This section of SustainabiliTank.info – REAL WORLD’S NEWS – will be carrying short notes with information not based on the daily press of the United States.
We will not attempt here to write lengthy articles, neither will we editorialize on why the information did not see light in the US.
If readers find other material relevant to sustainable development that was not published, please forward it to us at: Submissions@SustainabiliTank.info
People and Institutional Participation in Forest Management for Sustainable Development of Grasslands in Sudan. By Edinam K. Glover Last edited: Saturday, July 31, 2010
Posted: Saturday, July 31, 2010
Background Information
Dr Edinam K. Glover, Postdoctoral Researcher associated with Viikki Tropical Resources Institute (VITRI), University of Helsinki (2005-2006); specialist in community-based natural resource management planning and public/private partnership arrangements; Doctor of Laws (LL.D) Candidate (International Environmental Law), Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Finland.
Glover’s works focus on international, regional and national environmental law instruments for sustainable natural resources management.
He presented his studies at the “Drylands, Deserts, and Desertification – 2008 Conference, at the Sede Boger Campus of Israel’s University of The Negev.
The paper discussed aspects of sustainable development and participation, especially in the context of land and forest management in the Sudan. It also examined the increasingly relevant question of who should manage forest land; and is forest management more sustainable in the hands of local users or regulatory institutions.
“Edinam K. Glover, 2008. People and Institutional Participation in Forest Management for Sustainable Development: Options for drylands based on experiences from Sudan. The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research,Sede Boqer Campus, Israel.” (December 14-17, 2008) I was actually there having come after the failed COP on Climate Change at Poznan.
Dr. Glover did his PhD in Finland on grasslands in Sudan and his many papers on the subject can be found by Googling “Edinam K. Glover” we bring this here because it seemed intriguing that of all places, it was in Israel, that studies on arid zone in Sudan where being discussed.
We are specially taken by the above because we realized that at the UN, there was really no interest of what causes people in Sudan to fight each other – nothing about desertification, climate change, even oil, was allowed by the UN DPI in the News Briefing Room when reports of killings where looked at.
Be’chol Lashon is the Hebrew for “In Every Tongue” and it advocates for the Growth & Diversity of the Jewish People. Today Jews come indeed in every color and every stripes and some leaders do the outreach to embrace them all. Just look at Dr. Lewis Gordon of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Mr. Romiel Daniel of Queens, New York, The head of Jews of India in our region, Dr. Ephraim Isaac, of the institute for Semitic Studies. They do not look like your stereotype Jew. I met them and was impressed – the latter actually for the first time as we both visited Addis Ababa at the time of the delayed Ethiopian Millennium. Then Rabbi Hailu Paris with his communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Ethiopian born and graduae of Yeshiva University, and his Assistant Monica Wiggan (http://www.blackjews.org/Essays/RabbiParisEthiopianTrip.html), and Rabbi Gershom Sizomu of the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda from whom I got a very distinctive kippah with the menorah – of the old temple worked in. Then Dr. Rabson Wuriga of the Hamisi Lemba clan in South Africa and Zimbabwe and so on – in Nigeria, in Peru, in India, in China.
And who has not heard by now of the present White House Rabbi – Cappers Funnye – the cousin of Michelle Obama – and associate director of Bechol Lashon and spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B’nei Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of Chicago?
The New York regional director of DiverseJews.org is Lacey Schwartz who is also National Outreach Director of BecholLashon.org, assisted by Collier Meyerson and to top it all Davi Cheng, Director of the Los Angeles region is Jewish, Chinese, and Lesbian. As I said it is all a new image of the Jew.
Last night, at the Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard St., NYC there was a Shemspeed Summer Music Festival event.
The two further upcoming events in New York will be on:
Monday, August 2nd – the Shemspeed Hip Hop Fest at Le Poisson Rouge – 158 Bleeker Street NYC Featuring Tes Uno, Ted King & guest Geng Grizlee and others with CD Release parties for “A Tribe Called Tes” and “Move On.”
Thursday, August 5th – Shemspeed Jewish Punk Fest at Pianos, 158 Ludlow Street, NYC Featuring Moshiach Oil & The Groggers.
Rethinking How U.S. Jews Fund Communities Around the World.
The Forward
Published: May 27, 2010
For more than half a century, North America’s Jewish federation system has divided its overseas allocations between the Jewish Agency for Israel and the American Joint Distribution Committee. The Jewish Agency has been dedicated to building up Israel and encouraging aliyah, while the Joint has focused on aiding Jewish communities in need around the globe.
Today, both agencies are working to assert their continued relevance in a changing Jewish world. With aliyah slowing, the Jewish Agency is moving toward embracing a new agenda: promoting the concept of Jewish peoplehood. The JDC, meanwhile, has sought to claim a larger share of the communal pie, which had long been split 75%-25% in the Jewish Agency’s favor.
After a recent round of sniping over the funding issue, the two sides are now stepping back from their public confrontation and recommitting to negotiations over the future of the collective funding arrangement. Underlying this fight, however, is a more fundamental tension over communal funding priorities: Should overseas aid be focused on helping needy Jews and assisting communities that have few resources of their own, or should it be used to bolster Jewish identity?
With this debate raging, the Forward asked a diverse group of Jewish thinkers and communal activists from around the world to weigh in and address the following question: How should North America’s Jewish community be thinking about its priorities and purposes in funding Jewish needs abroad?
New Century, New Priorities
By Yossi Beilin
During the 20th century, the challenges facing world Jewry were the following: rescue of Jews who encountered existential danger, assistance to Israel, helping with the absorption of those who immigrated to new countries and opening the gates for those who were denied the right to emigrate. In the 21st century, ensuring Jewish continuity is the greatest challenge facing the Jewish people.
Yet too often Jewish organizations in the United States and elsewhere remain focused on the challenges of the previous century. (Indeed, Jewish groups were not very receptive when I first proposed the idea for Birthright Israel 17 years ago.)
Ensuring the existence of Jewish life (religious and secular) throughout the world via Jewish education, encounters between young Israeli and Diaspora Jews, creating a virtual Jewish community using new technologies — these must be at the top of the global Jewish agenda. This requires American Jewish philanthropy and leadership, which in turn requires discerning between past and present priorities.
Yossi Beilin, a former justice minister of Israel, is president of the international consulting firm Beilink.
Reviving Polish Jewry
By Konstanty Gebert
The rebirth of Central European Jewish communities after 1989, though numerically not very impressive, remains significant for moral and historical reasons. It is also crucial for Jewish self-understanding. An enormous proportion of American Jews can trace their origins to what used to be Poland alone. This is where much of Diaspora history happened.
Alongside the courage and determination of local Jews, the far-sighted support of several American Jewish organizations and philanthropies made this rebirth possible. In Poland the Joint Distribution Committee, the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and the Taube Foundation played key roles. Their support has translated not only into Jewish schools and festivals in places once believed to be Jewish-ly dead, but also in most cases into changed relations between local Jewish communities and their fellow citizens as well as clear support for Israel on the part of these countries’ governments.
Yet for all this progress, Central European Jewish communities might never become self-financing. The support given them by American Jewry remains a vital Jewish interest. It must be strengthened.
Konstanty Gebert, a former underground journalist, is a columnist at the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza and founder of the Polish-language Jewish monthly Midrasz.
What We Give Ourselves
By Lisa Leff
More than any Jewish community in history, postwar American Jews have used our prosperity to help Jewish communities around the world. On one level, the greatest beneficiaries of this support have been Jews abroad. But we should also recognize that these philanthropic efforts have shaped our communal values and identity.
Through our international aid, we have dedicated ourselves to universalist and cosmopolitan ideas like tikkun olam and solidarity across borders. In helping disadvantaged and oppressed Jews abroad, we have also deepened our community’s commitments to democracy, human rights and economic justice for all. It’s only natural that Jewish groups pitch in on Haitian earthquake relief and advocate on behalf of oppressed people of all backgrounds.
Whatever the outcome of the federations’ deliberations over how to divide allocations between the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee, it is imperative that American Jewry maintain its commitment to our values through supporting international philanthropy.
Lisa Leff is an associate professor of history at American University and the author of “Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France” (Stanford University Press, 2006).
Putting Identity First
By Jonathan S. Tobin
The choices we face are not between good causes and bad or even indifferent ones but between vital Jewish obligations. But since the decline in giving to Jewish causes means that we must make tough decisions, programs that reinforce Jewish identity and support Zionism both in the Diaspora and in Israel must be accorded a higher priority.
At this point in our history, with assimilation thinning the ranks of Diaspora Jewry and with continuity problems arising even in Israel, the need to instill a sense of membership in the Jewish people is an imperative that cannot be pushed aside. Under the current circumstances, absent an effort that will make Jewish and Zionist education the keynote of our communal life, the notion that Jewish philanthropies or support for Israel can be adequately sustained in the future is simply a fantasy.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine.
Collective Responsibility
By Richard Wexler
One cannot have a meaningful discussion about framing the national Jewish community’s priorities and purposes in funding Jewish needs abroad without first asking the question: Is there actually a collective “North American Jewish community” today?
Collective responsibility has been and remains the foundation upon which the federation system and, therefore, the national Jewish community are built. It is what distinguishes the federations from all other charities. It is embodied in our participation in the adventure of building Israel and in meeting overseas needs through the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee, in the dues that federations pay to the Jewish Federations of North America and so much more. But today, federations “bowl alone.”
Collective responsibility gives meaning to kol Yisrael arevim zeh l’zeh — all Jews are responsible for one another. Until federations understand once again that Jewish needs extend beyond the borders of any one community, we cannot have a meaningful priority-setting process for funding Jewish needs abroad.
Richard Wexler is a former chairman of the United Israel Appeal.
On the day of the grand opening of the Tobin Health Center in Mbale, Uganda, health professionals were already hard at work treating patients inside.
The center was open for business, but that didn’t slow down the lively June 18 celebration, which featured song and dance performances and speakers. About 3,000 people gathered at the center’s grounds to mark the occasion.
Seated under colorful tents was Diane Tobin, director of S.F.-based Be’chol Lashon and wife of the late Gary Tobin, for whom the center is named, along with three of their children, Aryeh, Mia and Jonah.
“Everyone was amazing, friendly and so generous of spirit,” said Tobin, who was visiting Uganda and its Abayudaya Jewish community for the first time. “They were so appreciative of having the center and demonstrated a tremendous willingness to work together. It’s a great model for the rest of the world.”
Andrew Esensten, Be’chol Lashon program coordinator, and Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, spiritual leader of the Abayudaya Jews and the first chief rabbi of Uganda, joined them, in addition to government and medical officials, and representatives from Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities.
The Tobin Health Center is named for Gary Tobin, the founder of the S.F.-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research, of which Be’chol Lashon (“In Every Tongue”) is an initiative. Tobin died one year ago after a long battle with cancer. He was 59.
“He really has left a legacy,” said Debra Weinberg of Baltimore, who attended the opening with her husband, Joe, and their 14-year-old son, Ben. The couple also helped fund the project. “I think he would feel deeply comforted to know it’s improving the lives of people.”
The 4,000-square-foot facility is a major component of the ongoing Abayudaya Community Health and Development Project undertaken by the Abayudaya Executive Council and Be’chol Lashon, a nonprofit that reaches out to Jews of color and helps educate the mainstream community about Jewish diversity.
It cost approximately $250,000 to erect the two-story center, using donations collected over five years. While patients pay for their services, continuous fundraising is a necessity, Tobin said.
Construction began in July 2009, enabling more than 50 Africans from diverse ethnic backgrounds to earn a living.
Stars of David are featured in the window grids, ceilings and floors of the health center, a “lovely expression of their Judaism,” Tobin said. Private rooms make up most of the top floor, with patient wards on the ground floor. A mezuzah is affixed to every door.
A large portrait of Gary Tobin hangs in the lobby.
“It’s so heartwarming,” Diane Tobin said of the visual tribute. “Gary would be so honored to have this health center in the middle of Africa named after him.”
Prior to the opening of the Tobin Health Center, the nearest medical facility to the Abayudaya Jews was Mbale Hospital, an overcrowded and understaffed institution not accessible to all the residents of the region. Tobin said there are other clinics in the area, but they lack the preventive health care measures necessary to respond to the community’s needs.
The Tobin Health Center is licensed by the Ministry of Health and is certified to operate a pharmacy and laboratory. It serves all who seek basic medical care in the region, providing life-saving health services and simultaneously creating jobs.
“The goal is to raise the standard of medical care,” Tobin said.
In addition, rental units on the bottom and top floors of the center will provide more job opportunities for locals. The first business recently opened — a hardware store that sells bags of cement, plumbing equipment and sheet metal — with a beauty salon and video rental outlet in the works.
The center “is rewarding on a number of levels,” said Steven Edwards of Laguna Beach, who, along with his wife, Jill, has been involved with the Abayudaya for six years. “The most obvious is to see this beautiful, clean building. On top of that, local dignitaries noted how lucky Mbale is to have the Jewish community and how much they contribute to the larger community by bringing jobs.”
The Abayudaya Jews comprise a growing, 100-year-old community of more than 1,000 Jews living among 10,000 Christians and Muslims. They live in scattered villages in the rolling, green hills of eastern Uganda. The largest Abayudaya village, Nabagoye, is near Mbale, the seventh-largest city in Uganda and the location of the center.
Research conducted by Be’chol Lashon in 2006 showed that contaminated water and malaria-carrying mosquitoes pose the biggest health risks to the community. A year later, the organization launched the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Project with the drilling of the first well in Nabagoye.
Since then, nearly 1,000 mosquito nets have been purchased and distributed throughout the community.
“Our goal is to respond to the needs of communities,” Tobin said. “If there are other communities that need health centers, we will be there.”
United States-India Agreement for Nuclear Cooperation Conclusion of Reprocessing Arrangements and Procedures.
Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
July 30, 2010
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns and Indian Ambassador to the United States H.E. Meera Shankar today signed the Arrangements and Procedures Pursuant to Article 6(iii) of the Agreement for Cooperation Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy regarding the reprocessing of U.S.-obligated nuclear material in India. Upon entry into force, the Arrangements and Procedures will enable reprocessing by India of United States-obligated nuclear material at a new national reprocessing facility to be established by India dedicated to the reprocessing of safeguarded nuclear material under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. These Arrangements and Procedures will facilitate participation by United States firms in India’s expanding civil nuclear energy sector.
This arrangement, negotiated and concluded under President Obama, reflects the Administration’s strong commitment to building successfully on the landmark U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative and is a prerequisite for U.S. nuclear fuel suppliers to conduct business with India. Previously, the United States had extended such reprocessing consent only to the European Union (EURATOM) and Japan. The Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative has facilitated significant new commercial opportunities across India’s multi-billion dollar nuclear energy market, including the designation of two nuclear reactor park sites for U.S. technology in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. Increased civil nuclear trade with India will create thousands of new jobs for the U.S. economy while helping India to meet its rising energy needs in an environmentally responsible way by reducing the growth of carbon emissions.
Open letter from Dr. James Hansen, published in Aftenposten, May 19, 2010
Dear Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg
As you know, I am fond of Norway, and have great respect for your country and its citizens, as well as for your personal ambitions to protect global climate. Your recent rainforest initiative is a splendid example of leadership the world desperately needs. And your commitment at the Copenhagen climate talks to reduce Norway’s emissions 40 per cent by 2020 was exemplary.
However, and especially in light of that, I am disappointed to learn that Statoil, Norway’s state-owned oil company, has taken such backward strides through its strategic decision to invest in Canada’s destructive tar sands industry. As the most energy-intensive source of oil, this project represents the worst of what humans are doing to the planet in a quest to prolong our global addiction to fossil fuels.
It is still feasible to stabilize the climate, but only if we leave the tar sands in the ground. The massive greenhouse gas amounts from the tar sands surely would cause the climate system to pass tipping points, while also trampling on the human rights of Canada’s First Nation communities and greatly damaging the Canadian boreal forest.
Prime Minister Stoltenberg, the world has reached a critical juncture in the climate debate. We can either move into the production of the most damaging fossil fuel, or we can begin to address our destructive addiction. We desperately need leadership at this time. I am confident that you could provide that leadership. Please do not prove me wrong.
In your capacity as owner or more than two-thirds of the shares in Statoil, I urge you to end Norway’s involvement in this dangerous, dirty and destructive project. I ask that you support the resolution at Statoil’s upcoming AGM on May 19th, that Statoil show environmental leadership and pull out of the Canadian tar sands. Statoil may pride itself on being a more responsible company than others, but that will not be enough in the tar sands. If we extract and use the tar sands, there can be no sustainable future for young people.
I look forward to my visit to Norway in June. I hope that it can be a time to celebrate Norwegian leadership in responsible environmental policies
Dr. James Hansen
James E. Hansen is member of the National Academy of Sciences, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, grandfather and winner of the Sophie Prize 2010.
James E. Hansen will visit Norway June 22 and 23 2010 to receive the Sophie Prize.
—————-
The answer from the Government:
Dear Mr. Hansen,
Thank you very much for your e-mail to the Prime Minister, which was forwarded to the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy as the governmental body responsible for Statoil ownership issues. Let me first take this opportunity to congratulate you on being awarded the Sophie-prize for 2010. I know a lot of people are looking forward to your visit to Norway, and I hope you will enjoy your stay here.
On behalf of the Government, I am pleased to say that we hold your work on climate change in high esteem, and further, that we appreciate your engagement and your views on Norway’s efforts to find good sustainable solutions to the global climate challenges.
As you now know from the results of the Statoil Annual General Meeting, we see Statoil’s oils sands investment as a commercial decision which is within the Statoil board’s area of responsibility. We are of the opinion that such decisions should not be overturned by the AGM. It is our opinion that this is in line with good corporate governance, a view that is also shared by a vast majority in the Norwegian Parliament. I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad, and we look forward to your continued engagement.
Yours faithfully
Robin Martin Kåss
Statssekretær, Olje- og Energidepartementet
Deputy Minister, Ministry of Petroleum and Energy
Postboks 8148 Dep, 0033 Oslo, Norway
Fra: Jim Hansen
Sendt: 24. mai 2010 14:08
Til: Postmottak SMK
Kopi: Jim Hansen
Emne: Climate Change and the Tar Sands Development Vedlegg: Hansen text for ad and letter in both languages.doc
Dear Prime Minister Stoltenberg,
I understand that you may have missed my open letter to you published in Aftenposten, so for your convenience I have attached it here.
My wife Anniek and I are looking forward to visiting your beautiful country in June.
With kind regards,
James E. Hansen
————–
AND THE – Message from Sophie Prize Winner.
I am grateful to Jostein Gaarder and the Sophie Foundation for the opportunity to discuss the state of Earth’s climate, the implications for people and nature, and action that is needed.
Our planet today is close to climate tipping points. Ice is melting in the Arctic, on Greenland and Antarctica, and on mountain glaciers worldwide. Many species are stressed by environmental destruction and climate change. Continuing fossil fuel emissions, if unabated, will cause sea level rise and species extinction accelerating out of humanity’s control. Increasing atmospheric water vapor is already magnifying climate extremes, increasing overall precipitation, causing greater floods and stronger storms.
Stabilizing climate requires restoring our planet’s energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth’s energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.
Actions needed so that the world can move on to the clean energies of the future are possible and practical. The actions would restore clean air and water globally, assuring intergenerational equity by preserving creation – the natural world — thus also helping achieve north-south justice. But the needed actions will happen only if the public becomes forcefully involved.
Citizens can help by blocking coal plants, tar sands, and mining the last drops of fossil fuels from public and pristine lands and the deep ocean. However, fossil fuel addiction can be solved only when we recognize an economic law as certain as the law of gravity: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy they will be used.
Solution therefore requires a rising fee on oil, gas and coal – a carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. All funds collected should be distributed to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations. As the fee rises, fossil fuels will be phased out, replaced by carbon-free energy and efficiency.
Governments today, instead, talk of “cap-and-trade-with-offsets”, a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.
We need a simple honest flat rising carbon fee across the board. It should be revenue neutral – all funds distributed to the public – “100 percent or fight”. It is the only realistic path to global action. China and India will not accept caps, but they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and avoid fossil fuel addiction.
But our governments have no intention of solving the fossil fuel and climate problem, as is easy to prove: the United States, Canadian and Norwegian governments are going right ahead developing the tar sands, which, if it is not halted, will make it impossible to stabilize climate.
Our governments knowingly abdicate responsibility for young people and future generations. I have been disappointed in interactions with more than half a dozen nations. In the end, they offer only soothing words, “goals” for emission reductions at far off dates, while their actual deeds prevent stabilization of climate.
The Sophie Prize provides a new opportunity to draw attention to the actions that are needed to stabilize climate. Norway may be the best place, with its history of environmentalism. I can imagine Norway standing tall among nations, taking real action to address climate change, drawing attention to the hypocrisy in the words and pseudo-actions of other nations.
So I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister suggesting that the government, as the majority owner of Statoil, should intervene in planned tar sands development. I appreciate the polite response, by letter, from the Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Energy. The government position is that the tar sands investment is “a commercial decision”, that the government should not interfere, and that a “vast majority in the Norwegian parliament” agree that this constitutes “good corporate governance”. The Deputy Minister concluded his letter “I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad”.
A Norwegian grandfather, upon reading the Deputy Minister’s letter, quoted Saint Augustine: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
The Norwegian government’s position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts. Perhaps our governments are in the hip pocket of the fossil fuel industry – but that is not for science to say.
What I can say from the science is this: the plans that governments, including Norway, are adopting spell disaster for young people and future generations. And we are running out of time.
Stabilizing climate is a moral issue, a matter of intergenerational justice. Young people, and older people who support the young and the other species on the planet, must unite in demanding an effective approach that preserves our planet.
Because the executive and legislative branches of our governments are turning a deaf ear to the science, the judicial branch may provide the best opportunity for redressing the situation. Our governments have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the rights of young people and future generations. I look forward to working with young people and their supporters in developing the legal case for young people and the planet.
To the young people I say: Stand up for your rights, for your future. Demand that the government be honest, admit and face the consequences for you from their policies.
To the old people I say: we are not too old to fight. Let us gird up our loins and prepare to fight on the side of young people for protection of the world they will inherit.
I look forward to standing with the youth of the world as they demand their proper due and fight for nature and their future.
In half a generation, a period that straddles two presidencies, politics has lifted millions of Brazilians from misery. Arthur Ituassu explains how it was done.
About the author: Arthur Ituassu is professor in the department of social communication at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro. His website is here
Democracy and politics are winning the war against poverty in Brazil. A report published on 22 July 2010 by the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA) – Brazil’s federal economic-research institute – reveals striking detail on the diminution of poverty in the country.
It shows that in the 1995-2008 period, as many as 12.8 million Brazilians escaped pobreza (poverty), and 13.1 million more were lifted from a deeper condition of miséria (destitution). IPEA defines pobreza according to individual earnings of less than 250 reais [$140] per month, and miséria by earnings below 125 reais [$70] per month).
There are other ways to measure the improvement: In 1995, 43.4% of Brazilians were considered poor by IPEA’s criteria, and 20.9% were living in destitution; by 2008, the respective numbers had fallen to 28.8% and 10.5%.
In addition, the Gini coefficient for Brazil – which measures economic inequality – fell from 0.64 to 0.54 in the same period (the coefficient deteriorates as gets closer to 1.0). True, income concentration in Brazil remains one of the worst in the world, but the improvement here is significant.
IPEA expects that if the trends are found to have continued in the 2009-16 period, miséria will be vanquished in Brazil by 2016 and pobreza will by then affect only 4% of the population.
A single era
But the numbers tell only part of the story. For Brazil’s democracy and institutional continuity have been vital in this impressive reduction in the country’s economic inequalities. After all, the period researched by IPEA covers two two-term presidencies, those of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-08, part of a presidency that will end in January 2011 after the elections of October 2010). Their administrations, by working constructively during this specific historical period, are responsible for a substantial achievement that has improved the lives of millions of Brazilians (see “Brazil: democracy as balance”, 15 November 2008).
The emphasis on democracy as an instrument of social progress in Brazil is justified, for the governments of “FHC” and of Lula were the first true democratic governments after the fall of Brazil’s twenty-year military dictatorship (1964-85). Fernando Collor de Mello was elected by the people in 1989 in the first democratic election of the new regime, but he was impeached after two years due to corruption scandals; his vice-president and successor Itamar Franco could have only a transitional role, albeit an important one.
The political era that oversaw these immense social and benefits began in effect in February 1994 when Cardoso – as finance minister in Itamar Franco’s administration – initiated theRealplan reforms, which crushed an epic inflation-rate that since 1980 had destroyed the value of Brazil’s currency. The success of Cardoso’s economic policy gave him the momentum to reach the presidency and govern from January 1995.
The results of this era, taken as a whole, demonstrate the complementarity of Cardoso and Lula’s governments (see “The price of democracy in Brazil“, 21 May 2009). FHC’s main purpose was to establish a stable economy, where the defeat of inflation was followed by major investments of political will and resources in the public healthcare and basic educational systems; Lula’s was to enlarge direct social benefits (most famous, the bolsa família, a minimum-income project that supports millions of Brazilians) in order to create new classes of consumers, and to boost the country’s domestic industrial production.
In the first six months of 2010 alone, Lula transferred R$ 7 million ($4 million) to more than 50 million people through the bolsa família. 25% of Brazilians now receive the benefit, which pays families between R$ 22 ($12) and R$ 200 ($113) a month.
A Brazilian prospect
The macro perspective, however, still allows for a more detailed view where some traditional issues of Brazil’s economic-development process come into focus. Two points in particular are notable.
First, poverty is being reduced at a faster rate in Brazil’s already more “educated” regions. Here, in the south and southeast, poverty fell by 47.1% and 34.8% respectively; whereas in the northeast, the north and centre, it fell by 28.8%, 14.9% and 12.7% (the figures for destitution are proportionally similar). In fact, the bolsa família’s impact in the northeast – historically Brazil’s poorest region – accounted for its achieving similar levels of miséria-reduction as the south and southeast.
Second, IPEA’s research confirms that economic growth alone cannot reduce poverty and destitution. The central part of the country – Brazil’s mid-west, where the capital Brasília is located – experienced the fastest annual growth of GDP per capita from 1995-2008: 5,3% per year. At the same time, the region had the second-worst annual record in poverty-reduction: 2,3%, better only than the north’s 1.6% per year. This result highlights a very powerful distortion in the Brazilian economic context: namely, the constant and disproportionate growth of the number of public employees and their salaries in relation to the marketised sector.
In 2002-08, for example (according to separate research published in 2009), private-sector salaries grew by 8.7% above the inflation-rate for the period (43.3%); while salaries around Brazil’s top public institutions (the presidency, congress and judicial system) grew on average by 74.2%, 28.5% and 79.3% above inflation. In February 2009, the average salary within the presidential apparatus – including all kinds of jobs – was R$ 6,691; in Brazil’s private sector, it was R$ 1,154. A major consequences of this situation is the weakening of entrepreneurship among highly educated young people, who prefer the “low work-high payment-very secure” conditions of the public service than to seek adventure and risk in the Brazilian marketplace.
But the results presented by the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada show that Brazil is at least on the right path in terms of poverty-reduction. Moreover, as I have argued in an earlier article on openDemocracy, this trend is unlikely to change irrespective of who will be the winner in the presidential election in October 2010, and assume office as Lula’s successor in January 2011 (see “Brazil after Lula: left vs left”, 23 March 2010).
This “virtuous cycle” is no less than a byproduct of major improvements in the Brazilian political environment since 1989: a “re-democratisation” process, a political and economic stabilisation, and a series of international compromises made by Brazil concerning such sensitive issues as trade, the environment, intellectual property and nuclear proliferation. It is a vivid endorsement of the value-creating, life-enhancing, society-enriching effect of sustained democratic politics.
Brazil, by continuing on this path, will most likely be in a much better shape than in the past to host international visitors during the football world cup of 2014 and the Olympic games of 2016. Any major problems ahead would seem to lie in the international financial and economic crisis coming from the north.
By Michael Soussan, Special to CNN.comJuly 29, 2010
Editor’s note: Michael Soussan, a former Program Coordinator for the UN “oil-for-food” operations, resigned from the organization in 2000. His memoir “Backstabbing for Beginners” (Nation Books, 2008) will be adapted to film by award-winning Danish Director Per Fly.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Michael Soussan: Leaked report shows Ban Ki-moon not managing UN staff effectively
He says US, other democracies should push to replace Ban when his term is up
The UN Secretariat is in danger of becoming irrelevant, the report says
New York (CNN) – The recently leaked memo from departing chief United Nations corruption investigator, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will make it impossible for the White House to support the UN chief’s candidacy for a second four-year term next year.
That is, unless the Obama administration itself was only joking when it promised to push for greater transparency and accountability at the United Nations.
In a 50-page “end-of-mission” report, the widely respected former auditor of Sweden — who was originally brought in to help the UN fix the spectacular accountability gap exposed during the excruciatingly painful “oil-for-food” scandal — paints a detailed, well-documented tableau of Ban’s managerial incompetence.
In a spectacular break from tradition, Ahlenius did what few senior diplomats ever dare to do: She spoke truth to power.
In her report, Ahlenius documents Ban Ki-moon’s repeated efforts to undermine his own senior officials, including her own office of internal oversight, by stemming the flow of information, interfering in the appointment of staff, or worse, failing to appoint people to senior management positions altogether. Critical leadership posts were left vacant for as long as possible, thereby strengthening Ban’s power over the bureaucracy.
The UN Secretariat, she concludes, is “in a process of decay … falling apart … and drifting into irrelevance.”
It may be that many member states do not actually want the UN to get in the way of their realpolitik. But when it comes to standing for the principles of its charter in difficult, often dangerous mission areas, the UN cannot succeed unless its staff are led and supported by a better-managed Secretariat in New York.
As it happens, even their very physical security did not appear to be a priority for the Ban Ki-moon administration. It failed to appoint another Under Secretary-General for Safety and Security for a full 11 months after accepting the resignation of David Veness, in June 2008, following the deadly bombing of the UN’s Algeria headquarters.
Ban’s failures to perform his duties as the UN’s chief administrative officer in a timely manner — the Ahlenius report describes these failures as widespread –have repercussions all the way down the line on staff security and morale. Instead of being empowered to do their job, the staff, including Ahlenius herself, end up feeling undermined by their boss.
Unless Hillary Clinton and her UN ambassador, Susan Rice, are prepared to contradict Ahlenius’ assessment, they will have no choice but to withdraw America’s support for Ban’s re-election (his term expires at the end of 2011). Unfortunately for Ban’s administration, few people were better placed than its own auditor to draw such conclusions.
And she is not alone in her assessment. Ahlenius has managed the rather undiplomatic feat of saying out loud what a lot of UN officials, including some at the highest levels, have been murmuring for several years.
While it is not altogether unheard of for former UN bureaucrats to blow their top after they leave office, it is without doubt the first time such a senior official has done so with as much competence, and credibility, as Ahlenius.
As a former employee of the UN’s “oil-for-food” operation — the organization’s fraud-ridden $64 billion humanitarian operation that saw billions of dollars diverted from needy Iraqi civilians into the pockets of Saddam Hussein and an international clique of corrupt politicians — I have learned to recognize the elements that go into making large-scale diplomatic fiascos.
After I had contributed to blowing the whistle on that program in 2004, some UN officials spent more time trying to discredit my testimony than to fix the cracks in the system that led to the debacle in the first place. Not so Ms. Ahlenius.
In fact, she invited me to spend an afternoon conducting a “lessons learned” discussion with her entire senior staff. Her approach was so markedly different from what I had experienced that I caught myself feeling hopeful, thereafter, about the chances of seeing real management reforms happen after all.
Unfortunately, it would seem Ahlenius has become a whistleblower herself. If such a senior UN official can’t seem to communicate her concerns to her boss and is forced into the very uncomfortable position of having to speak out with such force as she did in her latest report, it is difficult to conclude that all is well at the top echelons of the world body.
If Ban Ki-moon were well advised, he would not seek a second term in office. If he were earnest about pushing for UN reform, he would free himself from the pressure the member states may try to exert upon his office, officially make public those parts of Ahlenius’s report that do not affect staff security, and dedicate himself to mending the cracks in the system identified by his departing auditor.
Instead, Ban left it up to his chief of staff to issue a response which, both in form and substance, does a great job of confirming Ahlenius’ criticism. In a July 19 letter to Colum Lynch of the Washington Post, who broke the story, Vijay Nambiar says that his boss “is also concerned” that critical senior managerial positions (now including that of Ahlenius) remain unfilled.
The problem is, Ban’s job is not just to “be concerned.” It is to actually make appointments — or “to put butts on seats,” as one U.S. official once put it to me off the record. In this instance, Ban ignored the best advice of a 15-member independent panel and refused to appoint John Appleton, the former Connecticut attorney, to head Ahlenius’s investigation division. In the wake of the oil-for-food meltdown, Appleton had led an unprecedented exercise in accountability (so successfully, in fact, that his office was shut down in 2008).
Perhaps Ban would prefer to appoint someone else who, like he, prefers to show “concern” about the challenges facing the world organization than to take them on — with deeds, not just words. For the UN’s own sake, let’s hope the leaders of the world’s democracies can do better than that when it comes to electing a new leader for the United Nations in 2011.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Michael Soussan.
UNITED NATIONS, July 28 (Xinhua) — Angela Kane, the UN under- secretary-general for management, on Wednesday issued a rebuttal in response to attacks on Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s accountability that have emerged due to a scathing report by an outgoing internal oversight official.
Kane asserted that there were “many inaccuracies, misrepresentation, and distortions” in the end-of-assignment report filed by Inga Britt-Ahlenius of Sweden, former UN under- secretary-general for the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the group charged with carrying out internal audits of the UN and rooting out corruption in the global organization.
The rebuttal statement from Kane came as the General Assembly approved Ahlenius’ replacement, Carman Lapointe-Young of Canada on Wednesday. The approval of Lapointe-Young came despite considerable objections from some member states who would have preferred a candidate from the global South.
Kane firmly opposed Ahlenius’ accusations in her incendiary report that the secretary-general undermined her ability to hire her own staff at the most senior level, thus restricting the independence of the OIOS.
“A formal review mechanism, established to ensure the integrity of the recruitment process, found that Ms. Ahlenius did not comply with established UN rules and policies and noted further that she failed to rectify these basic shortcomings despite repeated requests,” Kane said.
The rules and policies that Ahlenius complained of in her report dictate that a female candidate must be on the shortlist for all senior level jobs at the UN in order to achieve “true gender balance” and that senior level hires are subject to a UN review mechanism.
“Review mechanisms and established rules are no end in themselves but key building blocks in the system of Organizational accountability,” Kane stated.
Kane pointed out that despite Ahlenius’ ability to hire lower level staff members for OIOS, Ahlenius left 76 vacant positions at this level when her term ended on July 16.
Kane also refuted another claim by Ahlenius in her report that Ban attempted to create an additional investigative organization that would undermine the authority of the OIOS.
“As part of his reform agenda, the secretary-general is engaging with member states on how to strengthen UN investigations, ” Kane said.
However, she stressed that these efforts do not amount to a takeover of the OIOS and its functions, and that Ban supports bolstering the group’s Investigative Division for the sake of building more accountability and transparency at the UN.
Lapointe-Young, who formerly served as auditor general for the World Bank, will face numerous challenges as Ahlenius’ successor.
“The new chief will be expected to build up the OIOS team, filling vacancies and taking on responsibilities of the department that in recent years have unfortunately gone unmet,” Kane said. ” The staff of OIOS have been working under difficult circumstances and we are all committed to taking action that will help the Office carry out its work.”
Less developed countries, such as members of the diplomatic African Group, approved Lapointe-Young’s appointment in the General Assembly but also voiced their concerns that she was the third out of four under-secretary-generals of OIOS that came from the more developed countries of the “North.”
Egypt, the current chair of the African Group, criticized Ban’s hiring choice at the General Assembly on Wednesday.
“This, in our view does not fulfill the principle of geographical rotation stipulated in the resolution establishing the OIOS in particular and the standing practice in the United Nations at large,” the Egyptian delegate said. “In this regard the African Group, which is underprivileged and underrepresented in the senior positions within the UN, believed to have a strong claim to that position.”
Egypt asked Ban to “look into ways and means to correct the current imbalance in the near future.”
C2C Launch Conference! Building a Climate Network, Williams College 9/24/10.
|
from
Eban Goodstein <nti.eban@gmail.com>
date
Fri, Jul 30, 2010
subject
C2C Launch Conference! Building a Climate Network, Williams College 9/24
C2C/The National Climate Seminar
Dear friends and colleagues,
Amidst the wreckage of climate legislation in DC, one thing is clear. This is not the fight of a day, of a year or of a decade. Even had the Senate acted, changing the future would still have required a vibrant, engaged global citizenry, pushing every day of every year, for the next 40 years, to decarbonize the planet.
American social movements—from abolition to civil rights—crest in legislation that changes the direction of the nation, and the world. We hoped this would be the year. We were wrong.
1. Every year, engage educators at 1,000 colleges, universities and high schools, and
2. Every year, involve 50,000 students in direct video and conference-call dialogue with Congress, with Corporations and with Cities, on clean energy solutions to global warming.
Following the launch conference, on 9/29 at 3 PM Eastern, join us for a National C2C Webinar. We need your ideas on how we can build a permanent and growing national network, including tens of thousands of faculty, students and staff, in regular dialogue with key decision-makers on climate.
This is the fight of our lives. Thanks for the work you are doing.
The Clif Bar Foundation is our longest-standing National Teach-in partner.Forty Percent of Car Trips are within two miles of your home: Take Clif Bar’s Two-Mile Challenge and ride or walk instead!
What makes a good UN story? We hinted at the Kevin Rudd idea earlier but we were still waiting for further developments.
Are we seeing here rumors because of infighting in Australia on the way to their National elections August 21, 2010?
Are we on the trail of rumors intended to save the Ban Ki-moon reelection to a second term?
Are we watching an Obama approach to create a new environment to save negotiations on climate?
Kevin Rudd would be an excellent choice to extricate the UN from the hole it created in the “Seal the Deal” charade when every child could have seen that the G192 is no environment to talk about Sustainable Energy options.
Australia is no good example either – but Kevin Rudd was ready to step out of his nation’s “is” and aim for a better future.
He got punished for this and perhaps is now ready for revenge by working on a global level that will then sweep with him his own country as well.
With his experience as Australia’s Prime Minister with-vision that was cut short from bringing his own country into the group of real leaders for tomorrow, he can work with President Obama and perhaps the other four leaders that hammered out the Copenhagen platform that is not dependent on all climate mongers of the UN circuit. As a fresh figure, he could perhaps sit down with the ALBA folks and take the best ideas they have and incorporate them also in a new recipe under the SUSTAINABILITY big sky of the future.
Will the UN accept him as a new Super Czar of a combined UNCSD and UNFCCC – or let him form a new structure so these older structures will just wilt away into oblivion slowly? Who knows? But let us follow this new world hype.
The subject having slowly boiled in the PRESS has reached also www.UNelection.org – so it is time for us to try out the waters ourselves also. This then reinforced the UNelections interest in the issue as per added - http://unelections.org/?q=node/2056
Kevin Rudd talks with UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon / AP Source: AP
KEVIN Rudd’s new United Nations post could be announced before the end of the election in what looms as another major embarrassment for Julia Gillard.
The Herald Sun can reveal the UN body Mr Rudd is being considered for is being set up under the working title High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability.
Mr Rudd is believed to have been backed for the post by the UN’s chief climate adviser, Janos Pasztor, and is odds-on to be offered the job.
Diplomatic sources said the decision could be made within weeks, which raises the spectre of an appointment before the election.
“It’s on the cards,” a source said of a pre-election announcement.
The Herald Sun believes Mr Rudd is favoured in part because he will have direct access to resources paid for by the Australian taxpayer.
This is on the assumption that the former prime minister is re-elected to Federal Parliament on August 21, 2010.
Climate change reform will be the centrepiece of the panel, virtually guaranteeing conflict with a Gillard government, assuming Labor is re-elected.
Sources said it would be created to look at climate change in the context of broader sustainable development, and would be part-time.
Mr Rudd has declined to say whether the appointment would be paid.
If he were to be paid, this could raise allegations he would be a part-time MP.
Mr Rudd’s spokesman directed questions to the UN, declining to say whether he already had accepted the position.
Mr Rudd has previously said he would serve a full term in Parliament and that any UN position would be part-time.
“It is a matter, of course, for the United Nations Secretary-General to clarify what roles would be played by any individual on such a panel,” Mr Rudd said on July 22.
The biggest political risk for the Government is that the UN body clashes on climate change policy backed by Ms Gillard.
Mr Rudd previously backed a 5 per cent emissions cut on 2000 levels by 2020 as well as a so-called cap-and-trade scheme, which involves setting limits on carbon emissions but allowing heavy polluters to buy permits to allow them to emit more carbon.
Mr Rudd dropped his legislation this year when it was blocked by the Coalition in the Senate and his handling of the issue was considered crucial to him being dumped as PM.
KEVIN Rudd’s new United Nations post could be announced before the end of the election in what looms as another major embarrassment for Julia Gillard. …
Jul 22, 2010 … Our socially-disfunctional-verging-on-autistic ex-PM would fit right in at the UN, spouting platitudes about saving the planet and the evils …
www.australianclimatemadness.com/?p=4315 – Australia – Cached
Jul 29, 2010 …KEVIN Rudd’s new United Nations post could be announced before the end of the election in what looms as another major embarrassment for …
www.heraldsun.com.au/…/kevin-rudd…un…/story-fn5ko0pw-1225898207146
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
SPEECH BY PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD TO THE. UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY. Acknowledgement. Mr President. I would like to congratulate you on your …
www.un.org/ga/63/generaldebate/pdf/australia_en.pdf
Jul 22, 2010 …KEVIN Rudd has confirmed he has been approached to take up a job with the United Nations.
www.dailytelegraph.com.au/…/united-nations…kevin-rudd…/story-fn5zm695-1225895300050
Jul 22, 2010 … Latest news, breaking news – Kevin Rudd considering UN job as climate … Ousted Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is considering a UN…
www.indianexpress.com/news/kevin-rudd…un-job-as…/650285/ – Cached
Jul 22, 2010 … Ousted Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd Thursday confirmed talks over a possible United Nations role but said he did not plan to quit …
www.bangkokpost.com/…/ex-australian-pm-rudd-in-talks-over-un-role – Cached
Jul 22, 2010 … Australian ex-prime minister Kevin Rudd is angling for the post of a climate change adviser to the United Nations, news reports said …
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/…/Kevin-Rudd…UN…/6201236.cms – Cached
Jul 22, 2010 …KEVIN Rudd is being considered by the United Nations for a top-level job that would force him to leave Australia.
www.perthnow.com.au/…/kevin-rudd…un…/story-e6frg15u-1225895337247
Jul 22, 2010 …Kevin Rudd has confirmed he has been sounded out about the possibility of a job with the United Nations, but says he is still committed to …
www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/22/2961142.htm – Cached
Jul 22, 2010 … OUSTED prime minster Kevin Rudd has confirmed he has spoken with the United Nations Secretary-General about a possible appointment.
www.news.com.au/…/kevin-rudd…talk…un…/story-e6frfku0-1225895627286
Climate report shows Earth has heated up over 50 years.
Which in the printed Wall Street version was rechristened – “CLIMATE STUDY CITES 2000 as WARMEST DECADE.” This appropriate to the US inward look of New York, while the above title is clear better positioned for the world at large -
By GAUTAM NAIK
A new assessment concludes that the Earth has been getting warmer over the past 50 years and the past decade was the warmest on record.
The State of the Climate 2009 report, published Wednesday as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, was compiled by 300 scientists from 48 countries and drew on measures of 10 crucial climate indicators.
Seven of the indicators were rising, including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, sea level, ocean heat and humidity. Three indicators were declining, including Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Each indicator is changing as we’d expect in a warming world,” said Peter Thorne, senior researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, a research consortium based in College Park, Md., who was involved in compiling the report.
The report’s conclusions broadly match those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, which published its last set of findings in 2007. The IPCC report contained some errors, which further stoked the debate about the existence, causes and effects of global warming.
The new report incorporates data from the past few years that weren’t included in the last IPCC assessment. While the IPCC report concluded that evidence for human-caused global warming was “unequivocal” and was linked to emissions of greenhouse gases, the latest report didn’t seek to address the issue.
The report “doesn’t try to make the link” between climate change and what might be causing it, said Tom Karl, an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration involved in the new assessment.
The report said, “Global average surface and lower-troposphere temperatures during the last three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, and the 2000s (2000-09) was the warmest decade in the instrumental record.” The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere.
The scientists reported that they were surprised to find Greenland’s glaciers were losing ice at an accelerating rate. They also concluded that 90% of planetary warming over the past 50 years has gone into the oceans. Most of it had accumulated in near-surface layers, home to phytoplankton, tiny plants crucial to virtually all life in the sea.
A new study has found that rising sea temperature may have had a harmful effect on global concentrations of phytoplankton over the past century.
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BUT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL IS VERY ANEMIC ON CONTENT OF ABOVE NEWS – IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, AS MOSTLY ALMOST – GO TO THE FINANCIAL TIMES. HERE YOU FIND FIONA HARVEY’S FULL ARTICLE – SHE CONTRIBUTES TO THE EDITORIAL SECTION AS WELL. YOU WILL BE IN THE CLEAR ABOUT THE MACHINATIONS IN WASHINGTON AS WELL.
You will also see there the Washington rot as in the following: “Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US, formerly in charge of energy with the powerful CSIS, said the new report would not change people’s minds. “It’s clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”
You will find that there was no doubt about the implication that it is humans who did it except in the words of that outspoken minority of industry lobbyists that hold power over Washington.
It is the first major piece of new research since the “Climategate” scandals.
It found that, relying on data from multiple sources, each indicator proved consistent with a warming world. Seven indicators are rising: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface. Three indicators are declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere.
International scientists have injected fresh evidence into the debate over global warming, saying that climate change is “undeniable” and shows clear signs of “human fingerprints” in the first major piece of research since the “Climategate” controversy.
The NOAA study drew on up to 11 different indicators of climate, and found that each one pointed to a world that was warming owing to the influence of greenhouse gases, said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK’s Met Office, one of the agencies participating.
Seven indicators were rising, he said. These were: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface. Four indicators were declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers, spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere, and stratospheric temperatures.
Mr Stott said: “The whole of the climate system is acting in a way consistent with the effects of greenhouse gases.” “The fingerprints are clear,” he said. “The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”
Some scientists hailed the study as a refutation of the claims made by climate sceptics during the “Climategate” saga. Those scandals involved accusations – some since proven correct – of flaws in the IPCC’s landmark 2007 report, and the release of hundreds of emails from climate scientists that appeared to show them distorting certain data.
“This confirms that while all of this [Climategate] was going on, the earth was continuing to warm. It shows that Climategate was a distraction, because it took the focus off what the science actually says,” said Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics.
But the report nonetheless remained the target of scorn for sceptics.
Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US, said the new report would not change people’s minds. “It’s clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”
Pat Michaels, a prominent climate sceptic, ex-professor of environmental sciences and fellow of the Cato Institute in the US, said the NOAA study and other evidence suggested that the computerised climate models had overestimated the sensitivity of the earth’s temperature to carbon dioxide. This would mean that the earth could warm a little under the influence of greenhouse gases, but not by as much as the IPCC and others have predicted.
“I think it is the lack of frankness about this that emerged with Climategate, and that seems to continue [that make people doubt the findings],” he said.
Steve Goddard, a blogger, said the conclusion that the first half of 2010 showed a record high temperature was “based on incorrect, fabricated data” because the researchers involved did not have access to much information on Arctic temperatures.
David Herro, the financier, who follows climate science as a hobby, said NOAA also “lacks credibility”.
But Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of NOAA, said the study found that the average temperature in the world had increased by 0.56° C (1° F) over the past 50 years. The rise “may seem small, but it has already altered our planet … Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying, and heat waves are more common.”
Date:29-Jul-10 Country: MEXICO Author: Brian Ellsworth
Reaching a binding climate deal at the upcoming U.N. conference in Mexico will likely be difficult, delegates from a group of developing nations said on Monday, spurring further doubts about a global climate accord this year.
Environment ministers from Brazil, South Africa, India and China — known as the BASIC group — meeting in Rio de Janeiro said developed nations have not done enough to cut their own emissions or help poor countries reduce theirs.
Delays by the United States and Australia in implementing schemes to cut carbon emissions has added to gloomy sentiment about possible results from the Cancun meeting.
“If by the time we get to Cancun (U.S. senators) still have not completed the legislation then clearly we will get less than a legally binding outcome,” said Buyelwa Sonjica, South Africa’s Water and Environment Affairs minister.
“For us that is a concern, and we’re very realistic about the fact that we may not” complete a legally binding accord, she said.
BASIC nations held deliberations on Sunday and Monday about upcoming climate talks, but the representatives said those talks did not yield a specific proposal on emissions reductions to be presented at the Cancun meeting.
“I think we’re all a bit wiser after Copenhagen, our expectations for Cancun are realistic — we cannot expect any miracles,” said Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.
He added that countries have failed to make good on promises for $30 billion in “fast track” financing for emissions reduction programs in poor countries.
“The single most important reason why it is going to be difficult is the inability of the developed countries to bring clarity on the financial commitments which they have undertaken in the Copenhagen Accord,” he said.
Hopes for a global treaty on cutting carbon emissions to slow global warming were dealt a heavy blow last year when rich and poor nations were unable to agree on a legally binding mechanism to reduce global carbon emissions.
More than 100 countries backed a nonbinding accord agreed in Copenhagen last year to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, but it did not spell out how this should be achieved.
The U.S. Senate on Thursday postponed an effort to pass broad legislation to combat climate change until September at the earliest, vastly reducing the possibility of such legislation being ready before the Cancun conference begins in December.
Australia has delayed a carbon emissions trading scheme until 2012 under heavy political pressure on from industries that rely heavily on coal for their energy.
The U.N.’s climate agency has detailed contingency options if the world cannot agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose present round expires in 2012 with no new deal in sight. {But the article does not spell them out and we wonder if they are any different from what we suggested – moving the deliberations away from the UNFCCC – to a much smaller group of Nations modeled along the lines on the evolving G20 with a united EU and a representation of AOSIS/SIDS and Highest suffering countries like Bangladesh on-board,}
Kyoto placed carbon emissions caps on nearly 40 developed countries from 2008-2012. {But Left out any responsibilities for the remaining countries including the above BRICS. Copenhagen was a success in the sense that it made it clear that the BRICS must be part of any agreement if it is going to happen – so, in this trspect, at Copenhagen there was progress – the first time since the beginning of the negotiations within UNFCCC.}
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The comments in green are those made by us – the editor of www.SustainabiliTank.info
WE ARE OPTIMISTS NEVERTHELESS AND WE HOPE THAT WITH THE UN-BASED SMILES FROM THE UN HEADQUARTERS IN NEW YORK, OUT OF THE WAY, A MORE ATUNNED CHRISTIANA FIGUERES WILL INDEED COME UP WITH A MORE MANAGEABLE DEBATE.
From the Wikipedia: Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen (born August 7, 1956) was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on 17 May 2010, succeeding Yvo de Boer[1][2]. She had been a member of the Costa Rican negotiating team since 1995, involved in both UNFCCC[3] and Kyoto Protocol[4] negotiations. She has contributed to the design of key climate change instruments.[5] She is a prime promoter of Latin America’s active participation in the Convention,[6] a frequent public speaker,[7] and a widely published author.[8] She won the Hero for the Planet award in 2001.[9]
For Latin America, in the BASIC group, speaks Brazil which has created for itself the image of an oil-rich country. This might create further difficulties for Ms. Figueres and we do not yet say that Brazil steaked out a final position for Cancun. In effect, the October 3, 2010 elections will have brought to the fore-front a new President for Brazil and we are yet to see his or her position.
Maradona out as coach as Argentina’s soccer coach.
AP – Argentina’s national soccer team coach Diego Armando Maradona listens to a question from the press prior … Also Brazil’s soccer team gets new coach Reuters.
By DEBORA REY, Associated Press Writer – Tue Jul 27, 2010.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Diego Maradona was given the boot as Argentina’s soccer coach before he could resign.His stint as coach of the Albiceleste ended far less successfully than his time as a player with the national team. The Argentine Football Association, which hired the former star in November 2008, said Tuesday that his contract will not be renewed. The decision came 3 1/2 weeks after his team, led by star Lionel Messi, was eliminated from the World Cup with a humiliating 4-0 loss to Germany in the quarterfinals.
“Diego shut himself off to any change,” executive committee member Luis Segura said on Argentine television. “Diego has all the right to do what he wants. But so does AFA.”
The federation had offered Maradona a four-year contract through the 2014 World Cup, but Maradona said he would do so only if his entire staff remained. That was unacceptable to AFA president Julio Grondona. He had asked for several assistants to be replaced, including Maradona’s close friend Alejandro Mancuso. The federation said its executive committee unanimously decided to not keep Mardona.
AFA spokesman Ernesto Cherquis Bialo called the decision “very painful” but said there was no way to solve the impasse.
“The president said that there was a significant difference between what AFA wanted to achieve and Maradona’s aspirations for the future,” Cherquis Bialo said. “There was a wide gap, and it was impossible to narrow it.” The spokesman hinted, however, there might be a role in the future for a man with an unpredictable history.
“This marks the end of a first chapter with Mr. Maradona,” Cherquis Bialo said. “The doors to this house, as always, will be open to him.”
Youth team manager Sergio Batista was appointed interim coach for the Aug. 11 exhibition at Ireland, which will be followed by a Sept. 7 home exhibition against world champion Spain. Possible permanent successors include two club coaches in Argentina: Alejandro Sabella of Estudiantes and Miguel Russo of Racing.
Asked about the full-time coach, Cherquis Bialo said: “The people who were in the meeting have no name in their imaginations. It has just been announced that the contract with the coach will not be renewed. And so, a new stage begins.”
The 49-year-old Maradona became Argentina’s coach in November 2008, replacing Alfio Basile and taking over a team he led to the 1986 World Cup title and the 1990 final.
He had little coaching experience, and his team absorbed two of the worst losses in the country’s history: a 6-1 rout at Bolivia in World Cup qualifying and the World Cup defeat to Germany.
Argentina attacked with flair in South Africa, with Messi setting up scoring strikes by Gonzalo Higuain and Carlos Tevez.
Maradona, dressed on the sideline in a gray suit, was an enthusiastic cheerleader, but that could not compensate for his team’s tactical deficiencies. The loss to Germany exposed frailties on defense and lack of midfield speed.
Messi, widely regarded as the game’s best player, left with World Cup without scoring a goal. Maradona never explained why Messi — he was left to roam the field on his own — wasn’t scoring. “Nobody ever told me where to play. So I shouldn’t have to tell Messi where to play, either,” Maradona said.
Maradona, who has fought cocaine and alcohol addiction, grew up in a Buenos Aires slum, and his escape from poverty has endeared him to many. But he has worn out his welcome in other quarters.
Maradona ruffled the government of President Cristina Fernandez, who twice invited the coach to meet with her. But cabinet chief Anibal Fernandez said Maradona failed to respond or answer the phone, forcing the president’s secretaries to leave messages.
Fernandez had been openly supportive of keeping Maradona as coach, and one legislator has proposed building a monument to honor him. Two weeks ago, the federation offered Maradona the chance to extend his contract. But Maradona put off meeting with Grondona to travel to Venezuela at the invitation of a friend — President Hugo Chavez.
Maradona’s relationship with key individuals in Argentine soccer also was tense. He barred federation leaders and businessmen with commercial ties to the organization from practices in South Africa while allowing reporters to enter.
Still, Maradona had many supporters. “I want Maradona to stay,” Interior Minister Florencio Randazzo said Tuesday in an interview on radio La Red. “We will support his decision. If he leaves we will miss him.”
Added team trainer Fernando Signorini: “I have no doubt they didn’t want him. Maradona is like a stone in the shoe of power.”
(July 27, 2001) — Perhaps the Iranian president picked Germany to win the World Cup?
Last week, at a national youth conference held in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took aim at Paul the “Psychic” Octopus, the seemingly clairvoyant, German-based cephalopod who accurately predicted the outcome of eight matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, including Spain as the overall winner.
In the midst of a fiery speech denouncing Israel, the U.S. and Iran’s other “enemies,” Ahmadinejad suddenly and surprisingly turned his vitriol on Paul, declaring the creature a symbol of “Western propaganda and superstition.”
“Those who believe in such things cannot be the leaders of the world nations towards human perfection, while the Iranian nation, with its love for the entire blessed values, is after establishing a humane world that would move towards absolute perfection,” Ahmadinejad said, according to a translation provided by the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Over the past two weeks, both Europe and the U.S. have introduced tough new sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear program. The country’s national soccer team also failed to qualify for the World Cup this year.
Paul, who recently retired following his pitch-perfect prediction record, has not yet issued a response.
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and we read and posted earlier that both – Spain and Russia are ready to pay good money to have the honor to host Paul the Octopus in their aquariums. Is Ahmedi-nejad envious of the offers to Paul?
A Reality Show – Climate Change is dead in the US this November. A full Opinion Page in The New York Times explains the Spin of the Washington Cowards. The facts are that industry and the people were against it and The President obliged. The Planet does not vote.
Op-Ed Contributor from the center – the Rockefeller Family Fund.
Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill
By LEE WASSERMAN
Printed – The New York Times Op-Ed page, July 26, 2010.
IF President Obama and Congress had announced that no financial reform legislation would pass unless Goldman Sachs agreed to the bill, we would conclude our leaders had been standing in the Washington sun too long. Yet when it came to addressing climate change, that is precisely the course the president and Congress took. Lacking support from those most responsible for the problem, they have given up on passing a major climate bill this year.
It’s true that passing legislation to rebuild our fossil fuel-based economy was always going to be a momentous challenge. Senators and representatives feel in their bones (and campaign accounts) the interests of utilities and the coal and oil industries. Even well-intentioned members of Congress struggle to balance the competing needs of energy-intensive industries, coal workers and American families.
But with climate change a stated priority for President Obama and Congress, how did they fall so short? By weaving four coordinated threads into a shroud of inaction. This began long before President Obama took office, but rather than rip up the old pattern — as he advocated during the campaign — the president quickly took his place at the loom.
Thread No. 1: Climate is out; green jobs are in. Despite climate change being the greatest challenge of our time, with millions of people facing inundation, starvation and conflicts over scarce resources, the White House directed advocates not to discuss it. At a meeting in April 2009 led by Carol Browner, the White House coordinator of energy and climate policy, administration message mavens told climate bill advocates that, given the polling, they should avoid talking about climate change and focus on green jobs and energy independence.
Had Lyndon Johnson likewise relied on polling, he would have told the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to talk only about the expanded industry and jobs that Southerners would realize after passage of a federal civil rights act. I could imagine Dr. King’s response.
The urge to avoid the topic of climate change is not new. While Bill Clinton and Al Gore have done noble work on climate since leaving office, when they had the presidential megaphone they did little to educate the public about the wolf at our door. President Obama has followed suit, and our national comprehension of climate change continues to stagnate. Virtually the only public officials working to shape opinion on this over the past two years have been those committed to misrepresenting the science.
Thread No. 2: Devising a bill for historic polluters, not the American people.Remember the president’s campaign pledge to represent the people, not the lobbyists? That’s not what he’s done on this issue.
For several years the Beltway wisdom has been that it is impossible to pass a bill without the approval of historic polluters, particularly the utilities, which run coal-burning power plants, the nation’s single largest source of climate-changing pollution. The administration and Congress did their best to get the industry’s permission for new regulations. They proposed handing power companies hundreds of billions of dollars worth of allowances to pollute, additional billions to subsidize the development of technology to sequester carbon from coal-fired plants, and evisceration of federal authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon. Peter Orszag, the budget director, said giving away pollution permits would be “the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States.” But no matter — it wasn’t enough.
Thread No. 3: A Rube Goldberg-policy construction. Because Congress built a policy machine designed for special interests, most proposals were chockablock with policy contraptions impossible to even explain, much less put into effect. Provisions included pollution allowances for favored corporations, carbon credit-default swaps, complicated worldwide offset provisions to enable avoidance of actual pollution reductions at home and loopholes to extend the life of the dirtiest coal plants. By the end of the process, even Campbell Soup demanded a special deal for the carbon-intensive job of making chicken noodle soup.
This rush to the trough was inevitable once President Obama ditched his plan to push a simple market-based bill that would have required polluters, rather than citizens, to pay for switching from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy.
Thread No. 4: The public sits it out. American history has few examples of presidents or Congresses upending entrenched interests without public pressure forcing their hand. Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore for a reason.
Citizens wouldn’t support an approach they couldn’t understand to solve a problem our leaders refused to acknowledge. Even the earth’s flagging ability to support life as we know it couldn’t stir a public outcry. The loudest voices insisted that leaders in Washington do nothing. —- They obliged.
Lee Wasserman is the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund.
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New York Times Op-Ed Columnist from the right.
The Right and the Climate
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Printed on The New York Times Op-Ed page – July 26, 2010
Climate change legislation has been dying in the Senate for months now, but Harry Reid’s decision to finally admit as much — in the midst of an endless East Coast heat wave, no less — has supporters of cap-and-trade casting about for somebody to blame. They’ve blamed the Obama administration, for prioritizing health care reform over an energy bill. They’ve blamed the American people, for being too concerned with economic issues to grapple with longer-term threats. And they’ve blamed figures like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, erstwhile supporters of cap-and-trade who have steadily backpedaled away from it.
But most of all, they’ve blamed conservatives — for pressuring Republican lawmakers to abandon legislation they once supported, and for closing ranks against any attempt to tax and regulate our way to a lower-carbon economy.
Cap-and-trade’s backers are correct to point the finger rightward. If their bill is dead, it was the American conservative movement that ultimately killed it. Climate legislation wasn’t like health care, with Democrats voting “yes” in lockstep. There was no way to get a bill through without some support from conservative lawmakers. And in the global warming debate, there’s a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the conservative movement and the environmentalist cause.
To understand why, it’s worth going back to the 1970s, the crucible in which modern right-wing politics was forged.
The Seventies were a great decade for apocalyptic enthusiasms, and none was more potent than the fear that human population growth had outstripped the earth’s carrying capacity. According to a chorus of credentialed alarmists, the world was entering an age of sweeping famines, crippling energy shortages, and looming civilizational collapse.
It was not lost on conservatives that this analysis led inexorably to left-wing policy prescriptions — a government-run energy sector at home, and population control for the teeming masses overseas.
Social conservatives and libertarians, the two wings of the American right, found common ground resisting these prescriptions. And time was unkind to the alarmists. The catastrophes never materialized, and global living standards soared. By the turn of the millennium, the developed world was worrying about a birth dearth.
This is the lens through which most conservatives view the global warming debate. Again, a doomsday scenario has generated a crisis atmosphere, which is being invoked to justify taxes and regulations that many left-wingers would support anyway. (Some of the players have even been recycled. John Holdren, Barack Obama’s science adviser, was a friend and ally of Paul Ehrlich, whose tract “The Population Bomb” helped kick off the overpopulation panic.)
History, however, rarely repeats itself exactly — and conservatives who treat global warming as just another scare story are almost certainly mistaken.
Rising temperatures won’t “destroy” the planet, as fearmongers and celebrities like to say. But the evidence that carbon emissions are altering the planet’s ecology is too convincing to ignore. Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.
But this doesn’t mean that we should mourn the death of cap-and-trade. It’s possible that the best thing to do about a warming earth — for now, at least — is relatively little. This is the view advanced by famous global-warming heretics like Bjorn LomborgFreeman Dyson; in recentonline debates, it has been championed by Jim Manzi, the American right’s most persuasive critic of climate-change legislation. and
Their perspective is grounded, in part, on the assumption that a warmer world will also be a richer world — and that economic development is likely to do more for the wretched of the earth than a growth-slowing regulatory regime.
But it’s also grounded in skepticism that such a regime is possible. Any attempt to legislate our way to a cooler earth, the argument goes, will inevitably resemble the package of cap-and-trade emission restrictions that passed the House last year: a Rube Goldberg contraption whose buy-offs and giveaways swamped its original purpose.
Liberals disagree, of course. They think the skeptics underestimate the potential for catastrophe, and overestimate the costs of regulation. They, too, look to the past for lessons, but their model is the Clean Air Act and its various modifications, which reduced domestic air pollution relatively cheaply.
But the Clean Air Act didn’t require collective action on a global scale — the kind of action that last year’s Copenhagen conference placed ever further out of reach. What’s more, a crucial technology, the catalytic converter, was already on the way as the act’s provisions went into effect. Cap-and-trade is more of a leap in the dark.
Liberalism specializes in such leaps. But you can see why conservatives might lean toward the wisdom of inaction. Not every danger has a regulatory solution, and sometimes it makes sense to wait, get richer, and then try to muddle through.
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New York Times Op-Ed Columnist from the left.
Who Cooked the Planet?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Printed on The New York Times Op-Ed page – July 26, 2010
Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.
Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.
But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.
So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate? Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been many attempts to blame the wrong people.
First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.
Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.
Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.
So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?
The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.
If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.
Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.
Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.
By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.
There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.
There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.
Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.
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And a Newsbriefs from IPS judging the reflection of the Washington Scene upon the UN Stage.
What are the chances of finding a meaning for the Cancun meeting November 29 – December 10, 2010? Will the the chance offered to the UN to throw well deserved mud at the US, justify the holding of that meeting? Grinning faces displayed by those that also had no intent at positive moves on this subject, that is what we see in the cards the future is holding now.
Hopes Fade for Languishing U.S. Climate Bill.
WASHINGTON, Jul 26 (IPS) – The Barack Obama administration has found success in passing healthcare reform and legislation touted as an “overhaul” of the U.S. financial system, but last week it became clear that the Democrats wouldn’t advance a climate change bill until after the August recess and, more likely, until next year.
On Jul. 22, Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid announced that Senate Democrats would not take up the climate bill before the August recess. Reid told reporters that Democrats simply did not have the votes to move forward on the legislation, which would have reduced carbon emissions but encountered wide opposition among Republican lawmakers and some Democrats. When Obama took office in January 2009, hopes were high for those who wanted to see the U.S. pass legislation to limit carbon emissions.
With Democrats in control of the House and the Copenhagen climate conference coming up, it seemed liked the pieces were in place for a climate bill which would put the U.S. in a leadership position in reducing global carbon emissions. But a brutal partisan battle over healthcare reform, a financial reform package that was only passed this month, and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – and the ensuing legislation to guarantee payments from BP – have all pushed the climate bill further down the road.
House and Senate Democrats are expected to suffer significant losses in the upcoming November elections which will add to the White House’s difficulty in passing a climate bill in 2011.
Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, expressed disappointment with Reid’s announcement and emphasised that the Senate’s failure to address climate change could mean that those seeking an effective climate bill will be fighting an uphill battle next year.
“To pass legislation, you need to move bills through both houses of Congress. The House of Representatives has already cast a clear, solid vote on this. If the Senate fails to act now, all that hard work will have been wasted and we’ll have to start from scratch next year with a new Congress likely to be less inclined to act responsibly,” wrote Krupp on his blog.
“Senate inaction will have very serious consequences for our environment, our economy, and, ultimately, our entire civilization,” he warned. The inability of Democrats in Washington to pass a climate bill will likely have broad implications for the international momentum to pass climate change legislation.
Already, the upcoming meeting of international negotiators in Cancun, in November, is being described as an increasingly unlikely venue for the signing of an international climate agreement.
“Cap-and-trade legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions appears to be dead in this Congress. Even a moderately ambitious alternative has been shelved until later this year at the earliest,” wrote Michael A. Levi, director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The biggest implication is that the United States has once again failed to confront its climate problems. But there is another: the United States is in for a rocky time in international climate diplomacy,” he continued.
Representatives from developing nations, which included ministers from Brazil, South Africa, India and China, currently meeting in Rio de Janeiro said on Monday that developed countries haven’t done enough to battle climate change.
In the past the group – which had joined the U.S. in forming the Copenhagen Accord -had said that developed nations should submit emissions reduction targets for 2020 and participate in national emission curbing legislation.
If, as seems to be the case, a climate change bill is not brought up in the Senate before the August recess, it is unlikely that developing countries can expect a definitive climate agreement in Cancun in November. Environmental NGOs here in Washington have been loudly claiming that the opportunity is not yet gone for a climate bill this year and that the costs of inaction are too high to accept.
Hurghada, Egypt – When Hamdy Shahat and his four-man crew first set sail from this resort town last month, he expected to return with a boatload full of red snapper to sell at the market later that night.
Instead, the 33-year-old skipper came back empty-handed, except for several streaks of thick, brown oil gummed along the hull of his wooden boat.
Thousands of miles from the Gulf of Mexico, the site of BP’s massive oil leak, Shahat had inadvertently discovered Egypt’s own oil spill. Now, just like most Americans, Egyptians are asking what went wrong in the Red Sea.
For fishermen like Shahat, navigating around small patches of oil floating in the otherwise turquoise-colored Rea Sea is not all that new. Egypt’s portion of the waterway is, after all, home to about 180 oil platforms and heavily trafficked by massive tankers heading north from the Middle East to Europe through the Suez Canal. In an environment like this one, small-scale oil leaks are almost the norm.
But this time, the oil was nearly impossible to avoid.
“I remember the slick looking like a lot more oil than usual,” said Shahat. “The way the sunlight hit the surface of the water the patch looked so big that we thought it was actually underwater coral.”
Last month, Shahat was among the first in Hurghada to discover, like other fishermen who inadvertently sailed through it, what some experts are already calling one of Egypt’s worst oil spills in recent years.
Many details regarding the source of Egypt’s latest spill, which washed up on the shores of an area rich in biodiversity and popular with foreign tourists, are still unknown.
The leak, initially reported to have blanketed a 12-mile stretch of sea, was first reported on June 18, though many here believe the oil started seeping into the water days earlier.
Scientists and conservationists admit that serious environmental damage was limited to only a few offshore islands because of strong currents and winds that quickly pushed the slick to Hurghada’s shoreline, rather than underwater to the coral reefs.
And by most accounts, the total amount of oil spilled in Egypt was small when compared to other international incidents, like the BP spill that was finally capped on Thursday.
But for many residents in Hurghada, there is little comfort knowing they won’t have to face the huge levels of crude oil that is now washing up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
The uncertainty over exactly what happened in the Red Sea in June, coupled with the possibility of larger spills in the future, is enough to keep everyone here on edge.
Nearly one month after the spill’s discovery, very few details have emerged regarding the source of the leak and the actual amount of oil released, prompting accusations of government mismanagement from a host of activists, independent scientists and local businessmen.
Amr Ali, director of the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Agency, an organization started by a group of divers, is leading the charge against the government’s handling of what Ali calls a “catastrophic” spill. The parties responsible for the leak, Ali said, did not notify anyone of the spill until Hurghada’s fishermen literally sailed into it — a full three days after it started.
“This is not just about the spill — it’s about how crises like this are handled with zero transparency,” he said. “Whoever caused this spill should not get away without a penalty.”
Ali said he was surprised to hear Egypt’s government eventually announce that they had sealed the leak, while simultaneously pleading ignorance on the exact location of the source.
Video footage shot by Ali’s organization, which was later posted to the group’s YouTube channel days after the start of the spill, shows an oil-like substance floating in the water outside an offshore drilling platform. In the video, a small boat dumps what appear to be chemical dispersants into the water near the rig.
The platform is identifiable in the footage as a similar rig run by PetroGulf Misr, a government-controlled oil company based near Geisum Island, just north of Hurghada.
For its part, the company has denied any involvement in the spill.
Khaled Boraie, a spokesman for PetroGulf Misr, provided GlobalPost only the following statement: “We have no relation with the oil spill in Hurghada.”
A sign displayed in the lobby of the company’s Cairo’s office proudly announced that they had gone 107 days without incident or accident.
Egypt’s petroleum ministry finally weighed in one week after the incident, issuing a lengthy press release denying that the company’s platform could have caused any spillage and offering several possible alternative sources.
“The spill was due to passing oil tankers that discharged their ballasts or spilled oil from their loads and then the wind likely spread it to the beaches,” said Khaled Ismail, a chemist with the government-run Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation, echoing the press release.
Another possible source of oil, which only amounted to between 30 and 50 barrels, according to Ismail, was older sludge spilled years ago on nearby islands that had melted under higher-than-average heat and slid back into the Red Sea.
Several independent scientists, however, refute those claims.
“I cannot accept [the ministry’s account] because the amount of oil found was much more than would come from a passing ship. And it was all crude oil,” said Salah el-Haggar, a professor of energy and environmental studies at the American University in Cairo. “They are aware of the problem but we are not. So we still don’t know how this happened and who is responsible.”
Though Egypt’s petroleum and environmental ministries were generally praised for the rapid cleanup of Hurghada’s beaches — thoroughly swept within just three days — many believe it was a cosmetic attempt to rescue only the areas tourists frequent.
Mahmoud Hanafy, professor of marine sciences at the Suez Canal University, worries that although the spill was limited in size, lingering pollution may have already disrupted the ecology on the islands off Hurghada’s coast.
The uninhabited Northern Islands are home to a variety of species of fish and turtles and also serve as nesting grounds for the white-eyed gull, a “near threatened” species endemic to the Red Sea. The oil washing up during the initially unreported first few days of the spill hit these beaches hard, according to Dr. Hanafy.
“The problem is that the spill happened in an area with a sensitive ecosystem. This is a very valuable piece of land for diving, as an ecological site and for oil production,” Hanafy said. “The challenge for Egypt is to figure out how to reach a balance between oil production and conservation of the Red Sea.”
Egypt produced an average of 685,000 barrels of oil per day in 2009. About 70 percent of that oil, according to Hanafy, comes from the fragile Red Sea ecosystem.
Many conservationists and tour operators saw a minor victory when, in the wake of the spill last month, Egypt’s petroleum minister said he would consider reducing the number of oil concessions granted in the Red Sea area.
Egypt’s tourism sector, by comparison, especially around the Red Sea beaches and coral reefs, is one of the largest sources of national revenue. In 2007, over 11 million foreign tourists visited Egypt, earning the country more than $7.6 billion.
Several beaches in Hurghada temporarily closed for a few days during the cleanup period last month. Sameh Hwaidak, chairman of the Red Sea Hotel Association, admits that tourism in Hurghada was not significantly affected by the spill.
But like many hoteliers here, Hwaidak watches the events transpiring in the Gulf of Mexico with grave concern, worrying that the possibility of an equally devastating oil spill in Egypt — with a similar response from the government here — would cripple the local tourism.
“We only found out about this the minute oil hit the beach. We put down booms and cleaned the sand, but that’s not the solution,” he said. “The solution is to stop the oil platforms from operating so close to our beaches.”
While driving down to Chauvin, Louisiana on Friday morning I saw a billboard confirming that Yes, the 75th annual shrimp and petrochemical festival is still on in Morgan City, La., on September 2-6.
How is the scrappy Plaquemines Parish Inland Waterway Strike Force cleaning up BP’s mess as oil creeps into their backyard the wetlands of southeastern Louisiana? With dustbusters.
Piles of dirty oil retention booms await disposal at a staging area in Grand Isle, La., Friday, July 23, 2010. The staging area was being prepared for Tropical Storm Bonnie which is expected to make landfall sometime Saturday along the Louisiana coast.
Soon after “Rep. Charlie Melancon (D) released an internal poll showing he was deadlocked with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) in their U.S. Senate race, Republicans released their own poll showing Vitter with a 17 point lead, 48% to 31%…
— As survival stories go, the Voisins have a gem: It goes back more than 200 years ago when the first members of their family to set foot on Louisiana soil weathered a monster storm in spectacular fashion…
DULAC, La. — In this region so threatened by the BP oil spill, it has often seemed to residents that the only thing worse than losing tens of thousands of seafood industry jobs would be to lose their other major job source: the oil industry.
Lee Celano for The New York Times
Patty Whitney at a recent meeting of Bisco, for Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing, in Terrebonne Parish.
Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, has called the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling “a second man-made disaster”; fishermen mourn the destruction of their way of life and defend Big Oil in the same breath; environmentalists call for restoring the battered coastline, not changing the national energy policy.
So when Patty Whitney, a community organizer here in Terrebonne Parish, asked a question at a recent conference about the state of the Louisiana coast, it was all she could do to keep her voice from shaking.
“We are constantly told, ‘You have to adapt to coastal land loss, you have to adapt because of the oil leak, you have to adapt to the new situation,’ ” she said. “When is our government going to adapt to new energy sources that aren’t harmful to our environment and the people who depend upon the environment?”
On the stage, the panel of engineers and environmental policy makers looked at one another. “Who would like to take that question?” the moderator asked.
The conference was financed by the state and by private donors — including the oil conglomerate ConocoPhillips, one of the region’s biggest landowners.
“You must be very brave,” another attendee, a professor at a local university, told Ms. Whitney during the break.
“Or very dumb,” she replied.
Born and raised in Houma, one of a family of 10, Ms. Whitney, 58, has long considered herself a closet radical when it comes to oil. Her mission at the grass-roots interfaith group Bisco is to help the disparate and largely disenfranchised groups in this region — African-Americans, Cajuns, American Indians — develop a political voice. As such, she has tried to keep her own mostly to herself.
But that is not easy for a Southerner with a gift of gab, a self-taught historian and a mother of three who takes umbrage at how the sugar companies, the fur companies and the oil companies have each come to the region and extracted its bounty.
“America needs oil, Patty,” a brother who is an engineer for an oil company told her at a recent family gathering.
“Then let them drill,” she retorted. “Let them drill in Yellowstone Park, in the Grand Canyon, in Puget Sound, off Martha’s Vineyard. Let them mess up their own places instead of just drilling in my beautiful Louisiana.”
And the spill, whose scope is still unknown, has prompted snippets of surprising conversations on the subject, even as the Senate on Thursday scrapped plans to take up a major climate change bill. Someone in church heard Ms. Whitney talking about the benefits of wind power the other week and signaled his agreement. Same with a woman in one of her community organizing networks.
“It’s at the point where people would consider talking about it, where before it was close to blasphemy,” Ms. Whitney said. “Me personally, I really and truly think the time is here, that even though it’s radical for this area, the idea of developing an alternative energy policy has come.”
Looking at Europe’s ENERGY PORTAL - http://www.energy.eu/ – we found the recent posting:
German power plant testing CO2-scrubbing algae .
Swedish energy group Vattenfall launched a major pilot project on July 22nd using algae to absorb greenhouse gas emissions from a coal-fired power plant in eastern Germany.
The two-million-euro trial run, which will continue until October 2011, in the Lausitz mining region is one of several experimental attempts in the sector using algae to slash carbon dioxide output.
“The microalgae use climate-killing CO2 to create valuable biomass,” the chairman of Vattenfall Europe Mining and Generation, Hartmuth Zeiss, said in a statement. “Moreover the new technology will bring useful know-how to the Lausitz and increase its importance as a region for energy production.”
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The above does not surprise us as we wrote about it after the Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, presentation by Professor Ben Amotz of Israel, who did this kind of work, successfully, at the Reading Power plant outside Tel Aviv.
Using the search button at www.SustainabiliTank.info for Ben Amotz see the following of our postings:
Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce today that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics. We wish to remind of “The Alga Dunaliella” that we wrote about in the past – as per Professor Ami Ben-Amotz of Israel.
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Posted in Brazil, California, Florida, Global Warming issues, Green is Possible, Israel, Reporting from Washington DC, The US States |
Israel has some of the most advanced algae research in the world. Now the Fletcher-Lauder Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya is offering a Post-doc on bio-sequestration of carbon dioxide from carbon-rich sources, e.g., power plants, through algae production. We described the work that was done by Prof. Amos Ben-Amotz as he presented it to the Green Chemistry meeting in Fortaleza, Brazil, and we announced also his new book release.
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Posted in Futurism, Global Warming issues, Green is Possible, Israel, Job Offers, Massachusetts, New York, Reporting from Washington DC |
GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY REQUIRES DECREASED DEPENDENCE ON FOSSIL CARBON.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Posted in Africa, Brazil, European Union, Futurism, Global Warming issues, Green is Possible, Islands & SIDS, Latin America, Real World’s News, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from UNFCCC Meetings, Reporting from Washington DC, UN Commission on Sustainable Development, Uncategorized |
Two Conferences in Brazil that The UN Secretary-General Has Missed. We submit that the Meeting on “Green Chemistry” in Fortaleza, Ceara, and the Meeting on “Fair Trade and Responsible Tourism in context of Solidarity and Sustainability For The Amazonas” in Belem, Para, Would Have Taught Him More Then Visits With The Korean Scientists and the Chilean Military in Antarctica, and With The Brazilians At The Central Political Capital.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
Posted in Argentina, Brazil, Futurism, Germany, Global Warming issues, Green is Possible, IBSA, Israel, Italy, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from UNFCCC Meetings, Reporting from Washington DC, UN Commission on Sustainable Development |
1st Brazilian Workshop on Green Chemistry, Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, November 18-21, 2007.
Sunday, November 11th, 2007
Posted in Argentina, Brazil, Future Events, Futurism, Germany, Global Warming issues, Green is Possible, Italy, Latin America, Reporting from Washington DC
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www.energy.eu
Dexia Tower in Brussels.
150,000 LEDs displaying the EU symbol.
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Europe’s Energy Portal: Shedding a light on European Energy Developments
Europe’s Energy Portal is a commercial organization, strongly rooted within the EU, but run independently from the European Union.
The portal is ran by the undersigned, together with a small team of professionals from the energy and environmental sector.
The portal was founded in 2006 and has grown into a real online beacon, a trusted environment where professionals go for their energy-related news, key statistics and energy prices. Europe’s Energy Portal business model is to provide customized energy data, statistics and surveys related to the European Union.
The portal is operated from two locations, one office location in the Netherlands and one in Brussels. The Brussels office serves as a meeting point, the Dutch one as a data center.
By Carola Hoyos, Ed Crooks and Sheila McNulty of The Financial Times.
Published: July 21 2010 18:27 | Last updated: July 22 2010 00:06
BP Executive Bob Dudley has said that the company’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “ will change the industry forever.”
That is not quite how other companies see it.
But around the world, from Norway to Australia and among BP’s peers, remarkably little has changed, at least on the side of prevention.
Company executives argue that the accident was preventable and that their own safety systems were robust enough to need no significant reform.
As Pete Slaiby, vice-president of Shell Alaska, told the BBC: “The Gulf of Mexico may have been a wake-up call for some, but not for Shell.”
John Watson, chairman and chief executive of Chevron, the US’s second-biggest oil company, testified before the US Congress that soon after the Deepwater Horizon disaster he had ordered a review of the company’s offshore operations. This swiftly concluded that Chevron’s “deepwater drilling and well-control practices are safe and environmentally sound”, he said.
Around the world oil companies have been giving regulators the same message.
It appears regulators have found the industry’s arguments persuasive and are – at least for now – not insisting that they do any more.
The government of the UK, which is about to approve the deepest well ever drilled in the country’s waters, said: “We have conducted an initial?[review] .?.?.?This shows our regulatory system to be robust and we are recruiting additional environmental inspectors to double our environmental inspections, of drilling rigs, to ensure compliance.”
While the US quickly ordered a deepwater drilling moratorium, others, including Australia, Greenland, Norway, Canada, Libya, China, Brazil and Angola, have not followed suit.
Australia, which had suffered its own major blow-out and spill just months before the Deepwater Horizon accident, was unmoved.
Martin Ferguson, Australia’s resources minister, said: “Shutting down the industry and putting the nation’s energy security, jobs and the economy at risk does nothing [to ensure safe oil exploration].”
In Libya, not only has there been no moratorium, but the government has allowed BP to go ahead with its deepwater drilling programme.
This caused some consternation among Italians and prompted Rome to approve a ban on drilling within five miles of its coast and 12 miles from protected marine areas. This ruling will only apply to future drillings and will barely affect the most promising areas off western Sicily, which Shell believes holds some of Europe’s most important reservoirs.
Environmentalists said Italy’s response to Macondo had been little more than a figleaf.
In Norway, where, as in Canada, public pressure was great, a moratorium was considered, but in the end the government proceeded with the vast majority of its auction of offshore exploration blocks, and a general moratorium was dismissed.
The biggest changes will come in the US, where the industry had for decades resisted any tougher rules.
The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main lobbyist, whose strong influence over the US regulator was seen as having indirectly contributed to the accident, is again taking a proactive role in trying to help shape the way the new regulation develops.
It argues that lawmakers must not forget that the industry is growing and is critical to every sector of the economy. “Any policy changes must bear that in mind,” the API said. “We can protect the environment without jeopardising our economic safety.”
One way the industry is demonstrating this is by announcing plans to fund a large response vessel capable of containing spilled oil.
Several oil company executives have said the major red line for the industry was the idea a second emergency relief well, like the one being drilled by BP, would need to be drilled at every deep offshore well, just in case of a blow-out.
In his testimony, Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil chief executive, said in response to that idea: “I would say you just doubled your risk.”
Another executive noted that such a measure would double a company’s cost.
But companies are resigned to the fact that they will have to submit to more rigorous and comprehensive US rules, such as presenting a safety case.
This would include thorough information of their drilling programmes and the way they intended to develop their projects, and details about how they minimise the risk of a blow-out.
This safety case is very similar to the regulation imposed in the UK in response to the explosion of the Piper Alpha natural gas platform, which killed 167 in the North Sea in July 1988. At the time, the US considered but eventually dismissed doing the same after companies heavily lobbied that such measures should remain voluntary.
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Above is only part of the article – the even more important part is the global map with the reactions from Canada, the US, Brazil, the UK, Norway, and Australia regarding: OIL INDUSTRY SAFETY – THE RESPONSE TO BP’S SPILL. Some of it is outright shocking.
Australia‘s Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, said that “Shutting down the industry and putting the nation’s energy security, jobs and the economy at risk does nothing to ensure safe oil exploration.”
On the other hand, a much more attuned Norwegian government minister – Mr. Terje Riis-Johansen, Minister of Energy, said: “It is not appropriate for me to allow drilling in any new licenses in deep-water areas until we have good knowledge of what has happened with the Deepwater Horizon.”
In the UK – The government has increased environmental inspections and has asked a new industry group to report on the UK’sability to prevent and respond to oil spills.
In Canada The National Energy Board has launched a review of Arctic safety and environmental offshore drilling requirements, to inform decisions about future applications for permits. The review will look at safety regulations and spill response.
And in Brazil, a country we had a close look at these last two days and we will report on this in www.SustainabiliTank.info, we found that contrary to our impression based on what we learned here in new York, The Financial Times found a quote from the National Oil Regulator of Brazil (ANP) the following statement – “It is important to complete a deeply technical investigation before deciding on regulatory changes … We only have a preliminary vision.” If what we heard is true, it seems that Brazil prefers not to be bothered with what happens in other locations. What does the Brazilian voter think on this? Seemingly he/her are busy bettering their lives so they are neither informed, nor interested in change.
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UK to hold deepwater inquiry.
BP bosses will be called in front of a new political enquiry into offshore deepwater drilling, MPs announced on Wednesday, writes Kiran Stacey.
The inquiry will be conducted by the energy and climate change select committee and headed by Conservative MP Tim Yeo. It is expected to call Tony Hayward, the BP chief executive, and will consider whether to introduce a temporary ban on deepwater drilling off the coast of Scotland.
The inquiry will look into safety procedures and accident cotingency plans. Mr Yeo said: “We need to explore what excessive risks have been taken and what is still technically too challenging.”
We find it quite appalling to contemplate that the American Petroleum Institute is allowed to participate as an advocacy group in the US deliberations on the Gulf catastrophe. Simply said – it was this group and the Cheney hand-picked people from among Big Oil that got the US to its present lack of regulatory capabilities in the area of drilling safety. We trust that there are enough ex-Oil-men and retired personnel, that could act as technical advisers to the US Administration in an effort to create the needed rules and regulations before allowing new drilling activities. The red herring of unemployment cannot be flung on the table in the present situation that might be ready to point out that unemployment benefits are less costly then the results of coverage of the crime of no-regulation.
Excerpts from “At UN, Of Africa Days and Al Qaeda Evenings, Burundi and Bacardi Gold.”
By Matthew Russell Lee.
UNITED NATIONS, July 15 — With small countries in Africa dominating the Security Council’s July 15 schedule … one of the four countries already on the “Peace Building Commission” (PBC) agenda, Burundi, recently had a one party election marred by tossed grenades and now the threat of attack by Al Shabab.
Burundi has soldiers in Somalia {and this is the reason why it has become fair game to Al Shabab}. Inner City Press spoke this week with the UN’s envoy to Burundi Charles Petrie. He put a positive spin on the one party election, saying it was not as violent as it might have been.
Petrie said the opposition is weak, and the UN must play the counter-balance that civil society and opposition parties would in other countries. He should know: he was thrown out of Myanmar by the government, then served for a time in a humanitarian role on, but not in, Somalia. He was in the French military …. The Council should have heard from him but didn’t.
The same might be said of the UN’s new envoy to Somalia, Augustine Mahiga. He went into the Council’s quiet room on July 14, but was not heard from by the Council as a whole. He met with the Permanent Five, one by one. He stopped to speak to Inner City Press, about including Al Shabab on the Al Qaeda sanctions list under Council Resolution 1267 in the wake of the Kampala bombings {This again, because Uganda has military forces for peace Keeping in Somalia.}.
Later on July 14, at an ill-attended UK reception on climate change in the General Assembly lobby, Inner City Press asked UK Permanent Representative Mark Lyall Grant about 1267 and the Shabab. He pointed out that they are already on the Somalia sanctions list, and who knew who is or is not truly affiliated with Al Qaeda. An Ethiopian diplomat added, not surprisingly, they are “definitely” with Al Qaeda.
But the Council sticks to its schedule. Guinea Bissau was the topic for July 15. The coup leader now heads the military; the UN “took note” of it. A Presidential Statement is to be drafted in the coming days.
Still and all, the Permanent Representatives of France, Japan and Mexico strode into the Council just after 10 a.m..
{Liberia is now becoming the fifth small African Country on the PBC operating table.}
* * * {And further at the UN} - In Wake of Uganda Bombing, UNSC Statement Does Not Assign Blame, Even After Al Shabab Takes Credit.
UNITED NATIONS, July 12, updated — A day after the Kampala double bombing which killed more than 60 people, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had yet to issue any kind of statement. In front of the Security Council on Monday morning, one non-permanent member’s spokesperson wondered under what agenda item the Council might issue a statement: Somalia?
Another spokesperson said moves were afoot for the issuance of a press statement, later in the day. Would it say who is responsible? After the bombing of trains in Madrid, the Council issued a statement blaming it on ETA. When Al Qaeda later took responsibility, the Council’s statement was never retracted.
Here, nearly all speakers including Uganda authorities are pointing the finger at Islamist Somali insurgents. They had vowed retaliation for the Ugandan and Burundian AMISOM peacekeepers’ shelling of a market in Mogadishu. Others pointed out the targeting of “Ethiopian Village,” given antagonism between irridentist Somalia and Ethiopia. Motive is certainly there– and, the media pointed out, opportunity.
As the draft text of the press statement was distributed to members, a Council diplomat told Inner City Press it did not assign blame, only the Council’s “standard terrorist attack language.” Might that change?
Update of 3:20 p.m. — Nigeria’s Ambassador, the Council’s president for July, read out a four paragraph statement. As Inner City Press predicted this morning, it did not assign blame. But in the interim, the spokesman for Al Shabab has taken credit for the bombings, saying they were months in the planning.
Inner City Press asked Nigeria’s Ambassador on camera why blame was not ascribed, and if this might not discourage countries from sending peacekeepers to Somalia. She declined the first, and to the second question said “there is a peace to keep in Somalia.”
Afterward, Inner City Press was told that Al Shabab’s confession came after the statement was circulated and concurrence obtained. They didn’t want to delay it. But wouldn’t it have been stronger if more specific? An Ethiopian diplomat spoke about Eritrea. If ten Taliban are coming off the 1267 Al Qaeda sanctions list, does that mean there’s room for Al-Shabab?
In Kampala, the Ethiopian Village?
Incoming UN envoy on Somalia, Tanzania’s former Ambassador Mahiga, spoke to Inner City Press at the UN in New York last week, including about the peacekeepers’ use of “long range artillery” and the civilian casualties caused. Will Mahiga take this so-called “collateral damage” more seriously than Ould Abdallah did?
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From the above we see clearly that when it come to the need to blame an Islamic insurgency, the UN is very slow at pointing a finger. There clearly must internal UN be reasons for that.
Now let us see what Fared Zakaria and his high-brow participants in his circle of policy reviewers think about the situation:
His program included Jeffrey Gettleman, the New York Times Bureau Chief in East Africa Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya) who saw the situation on location in Somalia, and Ken Menkhaus of Davison College in New Jersey, who served as UN Political Advisor in Somalia 1993-94. http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.z…
Chaos and lawlessness rule in Mogadishu, Somalia. And Al Shabab, a Somali affiliate of Al Qaeda, is exploiting that power vacuum and exporting terror.
Al Shabab claimed responsibility for the bombing of World Cup viewers in Uganda and is practicing an extreme form of Islamic justice.
What exactly is Al Shabab doing in Somalia and what can we expect next? Is there anything the U.S. or its allies can do to help the country that is called “the world’s worst failed state?”
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Somalia is a country of 6-8 million people and at the end of the cold war they were the most militarized country in the world. Now there are 1-1.5 million people living outside Somalia and the country was destroyed – not by bombings but by small caliber guns. There is no central authority in the country and it has become ideal terrain for an Al Qaeda base.
In 1992 the First President Bush had there 20,000 troops and left to avoid worst disaster leaving behind total vacuum.
The locals are incapable of establishing a functioning government. Foreign funds that go to an interim government are dissipated but nevertheless there is a will on the outside to view this government as a transition – the question transition to what?
The Al Shabab is widely unpopular but viewed as an alternative to useless government. This Al Shabab practices the most tuthless of Islam justice – like the cutting off of arms for suspected thieves.
In this second level of vacuum move in the foreigners – be these the Al Qaeda people from Pakistan who want to see if they can move here as a new home base, and some more benevolent home comers from among the Somali diaspora that actually are ready to provide their skills in building government at locality levels like cities. These are very welcome by the elders who are ready to back their efforts with the elder prestige.
This latter is the hope – but this is a bottom up government – and who will say that this will lead to a National government in its present borders? Would it not make sense to let them rule according to the ethnic divisions of the country and resulting in two or three smaller States that can then go their own ways? Jeffret Gettleman has seen this function on the ground in several locations where the situation is thus much better then in the country at large.
The importance of this goes well beyond Somalia and the case that came to mind in this CNN/GPS program was Iraq.
With the Iraqi elections held 133 days ago and a Parliament that todate has met only for the grandiose time of 18 minutes, and with the upcoming holidays, the evidence that nothing else can be expected before September and the US troops starting by then to leave the country, is Iraq going to be next Somalia?
So – the conclusion is that government can be built only bottom up if the idea is to reach up to democracy – and then why insist on having a non-unified country when the only evidence at hand is that the people actually hate each other and belong to various groups with the only semblance of unity is the unity of cleptocrats?
This disaster of Somalia may turn out to speak not only of Africa, but also of Iraq and why not of Afghanistan?
These problem go well beyond the limited scope we started out with.
Somalia Centre Stage Ahead of AU Summit.
Joshua Kyalimpa - ipsterraviva.netKAMPALA, Jul 18 (IPS) – The African Union summit opens in Kampala on July 19 amid heightened security following twin bomb attacks a week earlier. The official theme of child and maternal mortality will likely be overshadowed by discussion of the AU’s mission in Somalia.
The blasts, which killed at least 74 people and wounded 82 others watching the World Cup finals on big screens at the Ethiopian Village Restaurant in Kampala’s Kabalagala neighbourhood, and at the Kyaddondo rugby grounds. The attacks came just two days after a spokesperson for Somalia’s al-Shabaab group, which is fighting against the weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG) for control of the country, said Uganda would be targeted for its role in the conflict.
Questioning military solutions Some analysts argue that a troop surge will achieve little, pointing to the difficulties faced by Ethiopia. Ethiopian soldiers entered Somalia in December 2006 to push back the Union of Islamic Courts, an Islamist group with ambitions to establish sharia law in Somalia, from which al-Shabaab subsequently emerged.
But while the UIC’s bid for control was halted, this larger force was unable to fully capture the capital or impose itself in the countryside; the Ethiopians pulled out and were replaced by the Ugandan-dominated AMISOM.
Makerere University political scientist Yassin Olum believes it is time for Uganda to review its position in Somalia, with a view to withdrawing.
“We have to ask ourselves why other African countries are not sending troops to Somalia. Maybe they have realised it’s a hot potato or they view it as an internal matter,” says Olum.
Targeting the AU mission in Somalia
Uganda contributes the majority of the 5,000 troops in the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which has helped the TFG maintain a tenuous hold over parts of the capital, Mogadishu, but little more.
“We are sending a message to every country who is willing to send troops to Somalia that they will face attacks on their territory,” said al-Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamoud Rage following the attacks. He added that Burundi, the second-largest troop contributor to AMISOM after Uganda, “will face similar attacks if they don’t withdraw.”
Bahoku Barigye, spokesperson for AMISOM, told IPS that the mission’s mandate should be expanded from peace-keeping – its terms of reference originate in a U.N. resolution authorising a “training and protection” mission – to one of peace enforcement, for which more soldiers would be needed.
“We have troops guarding the airport, the presidential palace, the port and other key installations this leaves us with few men to defend the civilians,” says Barigye.
Security personnel in Uganda have so far made 20 arrests; two men have also been detained in neighbouring Kenya in connection with the bombings.
Despite previous commitments by members of the African Union to contribute to a force of 20,000 peacekeepers, there are only about 5,000 troops in the Somali capital in support of the weak transitional federal government. Over 3,000 of these are from Uganda, the rest are from Burundi.
Uganda undeterred
At a Jul. 14 meeting called after the Kampala bombings, the Inter Government Authority on Development, a regional bloc of countries in the Horn of Africa, agreed to send an additional 2,000 soldiers.
Uganda has indicated it will send in more of its own troops if other countries are not willing.
Addressing a news conference at his private home in Ntugamo, western Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni said, “It was a very big mistake on their side; we shall
Development goals overshadowed by conflict? African civil society has voiced concerns that the AU summit to be held in Kampala from Jul. 17-19 could be dominated by the Somalia question.
The official theme of the summit is “Maternal, Infant and Child Health and Development in Africa,” but consideration of this development goal seems likely to suffer the same fate as previous themes on water and sanitation and promotion of agriculture: a formal declaration will be made, but the summit will be dominated by al-Shabaab’s bombing of Uganda, the leading contributor of troops to the AU’s mission in Somalia.
Civil society organisations organised a forum in Kampala ahead of the summit to enable civil society, ordinary citizens and key stake holders deliberate on the key issues and demand action, but now doubt they will get a platform to present their case to African leaders.
l deal with the authors of this crime.” He is also reported to have assured the U.S., which takes an active interest in Somali Islamist activity, that Uganda would not try to disentangle itself from the conflict in Somalia.
The U.S. ambassador to Uganda, Jerry Lanier, said, “We believe the Uganda mission is more important than ever now.”
The ambassador said the U.S. planned to increase assistance to Uganda and AMISOM.
Political scientist Yassin Olum says the Ugandan president needed more time to reflect on the matter before making statements.
“What this means is that we are no longer neutral in the conflict and we are fighting on the side of the Transitional Federal Government which is dangerous. This is not conventional warfare where you need more troops to defeat the enemy.”
Fred Bwire, a Kampala city resident, voices the attitude of many ordinary Ugandans towards the Somali mission. “What are we doing there? Our people are being killed for nothing. Why aren’t Kenyans – who are neighbors with Somalia – bothered?”
Hussein Kyanjo, an opposition member of parliament, believes the main beneficiary of Uganda’s continued involvement in Somalia is President Museveni himself. “He knows that the United States of America opposes the al-Shabaab and so he fights U.S. enemies to blind them to his dictatorial tendencies.”
Amama Mbabazi, Uganda’s minister for security, responds that Kyanjo forgets that Uganda was suffered terrorist attacks long before it sent troops to Somalia.
“The Allied Democratic Forces – another rebel outfit with links to Al-Qaeda – killed many people in the past and my friend Kyanjo seems to have forgotten this.”
In their struggle against the government, the Islamist ADF rebels attacked police posts, schools and trade centres in the west of the country beginning in 1996; in 1998, it carried out several bombings in Kampala, killing five and wounding six others. Military action by the Ugandan army largely destroyed the group the following year.
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July 21, 2010 as per official UN NEWS we are not convinced the UN has the faintest idea of what to do about Somalia beyond calling for wasting some more money on it:
UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE 21 July, 2010 =========================================================================
UN SOUNDS THE ALARM AS DIRE HUMANITARIAN SITUATION CONTINUES TO GRIP SOMALIA .
As Somalia remains in the grip of a humanitarian crisis, it is vital to ensure adequate funding to assist the 3.2 million people – or more than 40 per cent of the population – who rely on international aid, a senior United Nations aid official stressed today.
UN agencies and their partners have so far received only 56 per cent of the $600 million needed to fund critical areas such as health, water and sanitation, nutrition and livelihood support in Somalia, which is recovering from drought and years of chaos and is also in the throes of ongoing violence.
“My major concern at this time of the year is that there is a renewed emphasis on ensuring that we do address the funding gaps in Somalia to help us to sustain the achievements that can continue to be made in one of the world’s most difficult and acute humanitarian crises,” said Mark Bowden, the UN Humanitarian and Resident Coordinator for Somalia.
He told a news conference in New York that the situation in the Horn of Africa nation is characterized by severe child malnutrition, loss of livestock and livelihoods, as well as ongoing displacement owing to continued clashes between Government forces and Islamist militant groups.
The conflict has led to Somalia being one of the countries with the highest number of uprooted people in the world – an estimated 1.4 million displaced within the country and almost 595,000 living as refugees in neighbouring countries.
“Conflict is the driving cause behind displacement and most of it comes from Mogadishu,” he said, noting that 20,000 people were displaced in the capital in June, and an estimated 200,000 people have been displaced from the city this year.
In addition, fighting in Mogadishu since March this year has led to more than 3,000 conflict-related casualties.
“What I genuinely hope is that we try to find some way of reducing the impact of this conflict on the civilian population and all parties need to find more peaceful means of settling their disputes,” he said, adding that where that is not possible, to at least avoid the considerable collateral damage on civilians.
Despite the ongoing crisis, Mr. Bowden noted that the situation in Somalia “isn’t all bad news,” although it is one of the most complicated humanitarian situations the UN is facing.
Some major achievements include keeping the country free of polio amid a resurgence of the disease in a number of other African countries. This is thanks to the provision of clean water to 1.3 million people, as well as vaccination campaigns that were carried out, even in volatile areas.
“We are able to make progress in terms of managing humanitarian operations in extremely difficult circumstances, which include control of large parts of the country by rebel groups and active conflict in other parts,” he noted.
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And Inner City Press from the UN continues its bleak reporting from the UN that really shows again and again that the UN will not lead the Somalis out of their misery.
Killing of Civilians by UN Supported Troops in Somalia Admitted But Not Acted On.
By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, July 21 — In the wake of the World Cup finals bombing in Uganda, there has been even less discussion of the civilians being killed in Mogadishu by the peacekeeping mission which the UN is supporting. But a memo leaked from within that AMISOM mission notes continued firing into civilian neighborhoods.
Inner City Press asked UN Humanitarian coordinator Mark Bowden whether there is a special responsibility on the UN to ensure that the troops to which it provides logistical support through its UNSOA office are not killing civilians. “Yes there is,” Bowden said, adding that he’s “had discussions” with Ambassador Diarra of the African Union about “reducing civilian casualties.” ……….. it continues
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On Child Soldiers Supported by UN in Somalia, UNSC Will Respond After 3 Years.
By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, June 16, updated — Days after the UN-supported Somali Transitional Federal Government’s use of child soldiers was widely exposed, the UN Security Council’s lack of seriousness on the issue was on display on Wednesday. Mexican foreign minister Patricia Espinosa presided over a day-long series of speeches about children and armed conflict. At noon, Inner City Press asked her what she and the Council would do about their support of the TFG, which uses children as young as nine and 12 to wield AK-47s in Mogadishu.
This has not been raised to the Security Council, Secretary Espinosa replied, not even to the Working Group. …… more
Dep FM Ayalon meets Dominican Republic Minister of Justice
20 Jul 2010
Israel Deputy FM Ayalon and Dominican Republic Minister of Justice:
“We will work together to rehabilitate Haiti.”
Dominican Republic Minister of Justice:
“We wish to assist you in promoting peace in the region.”
Dep FM Ayalon (MFA archive photo)
Danny Ayalon is a former Israel Ambassador to Washington DC; Now as a Member of Foreign Minister’s Avigdor Liberman Israel Beitenu Party – he is his Deputy FM.
(Communicated by the Deputy Foreign Minister’s Bureau)
In the first meeting of its kind between the Minister of Justice of the Dominican Republic and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, it was decided to form a partnership and to strengthen bilateral ties so as to work together in the rehabilitation of Haiti. The plan is to establish an Israeli village that includes a school, a medical center, community centers and sport facilities, as well as the dispatch of a 14-member contingent from the Israeli police force.
DFM Ayalon: “MASHAV (Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation) is Israel’s arm for strengthening its international ties and positioning its image around the world. For example, under the auspices of the MFA, over 5000 Dominican Republic students attended MASHAV training courses in Israel in the fields of development, water and agriculture, and prisoner rehabilitation programs. “Both countries have the potential to upgrade the relationship and to cooperate on various issues.”
DFM Ayalon also mentioned the large amount of Israeli aid aimed at the rehabilitation of Haiti, a process that the Dominican Republic is directing. DFM Ayalon stated that “Israel has the ability to provide humanitarian and professional aid to its friends around the world.”
The Dominican Republic’s Minister of Justice said: “We are deeply impressed with Israeli capabilities in various fields. Cooperation with Israel is very important to us.” The Minister added that his country is interested in assisting with the peace process in the Middle East.
DFM Ayalon briefed his guest on the situation in the Middle East in general and the progress in the negotiations with the Palestinians in particular. DFM Ayalon emphasized his concern with Iranian penetration into South America, and said, “The Iranian nuclear program is not only Israel’s concern, but that of the entire world. The international community must continue to oppose the Iranian nuclear program.” Regarding sanctions against Iran, DFM Ayalon added, “We will be able to determine if the sanctions are working within a few months.”
Eli Kintisch is reporter for Science Magazine and author of “Hack the Planet”released by Wiley April 19, 2010.
Bill McKibben, author of “EARTH: MAKING A LIFE ON A TOUGH NEW PLANET” and co-founder of 350.org, an organization that our readers know that we hold in very high esteem, wrote about “HACK THE PLANET:”
“Anyone who considers themselves scientifically literate had better get versed in the new discipline of geo-engineering — or planethacking, as Eli Kintisch calls it in his nuanced and useful new account. This discussion is not going to go away anytime soon!”
Once the stuff of science fiction, geoengineering has come into the mainstream, with top scientists, the National Academy of Science and Congress investigating this radical concept.
and if you need a contact – the book’s publicity is with Erin Beam of ebeam at wiley.com
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I got a few minutes late to the library’s lower level and so a nice size roomful of very mixed crowd – from the young shoeless intellectual in the front row to the spectacled white hair retiree in the back row. They all listened very intent and at the end asked good questions.
As my usual way, I went directly to the table loaded with the books for sale, took one and stood next to the wall – leafing from cover to cover. That is how I learned that the book starts with old-time friend Academician Yuriy Izrael from Moscow with whom I shared before the Rio Summit of 1992 two weeks in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, where local Professor Jose Oswaldo Carioca was preparing for a Brazilian submission to the upcoming UN Conference on Environment and Development. Since then I visited with Academician Izrael a couple of times in Moscow – the last time in Moscow during the September 29 – October 3, 2003 World Climate Change Conference where he was the head of the local organizing scientific committee and co-chair of the Conference, with Mr. A. N. Illarionov (Andrey Nikolayevich), the Adviser of then Russia President Vladimir Putin. Bert Bolin of Sweden, a pioneering climatologist and the first chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was the foreign co-chair of the event.
That was a very important meeting, with participants from over 100 countries, because it dealt with the crucial question – Will Russia Ratify the Kyoto Protocol? At the time Putin was relying on Yu. Izrael and Andrey Nikolayevich, and the world still thought that the KP is imperative for a Multilateral approach to Climate Change. With the US clearly out – Russia became all important in order to reach the magic number of ratifications so the KP gets into effect. Eventually it became Putins decision to say – DA – YES – while his two advisers still said NO!
That was real drama.
Somehow I still have my stash of papers from that meeting and I was looking now at hints at geoengineering in Russia’s position. But I did find a list of 10 questions Illarionov did put before the conference in his presentation that had the title: “Antropogenic Factors in Global Warming: Some Questions.” It was Bert Bolin, chair emeritus of IPCC, who gave the two answers with the last one answering to “How much will it cost.” This is fascinating history from the days we thought we had a plan – but the Russians seemingly were already convinced then that we really had no plan.
Strangely, when I looked up Google I found there on first page for Illarionov -
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
Answers to Questions by A. Illarionov (Adviser of the President of Russian Federation). Moscow – World Climate Change Conference 2003 …
www.sysecol.ethz.ch/Articles_Reports/Illarionov_QandA_WCCC_2003.pdf
further: As a senior advisor to Russian President Putin, Illarionov was outspoken against Russia’s ratification of Kyoto. Despite Illarionov’s vocal opposition, Putin ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2004. In October 2006, Illarionov was appointed senior researcher of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity of the US libertarian think tank Cato Institute in Washington, DC.
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The above was just an aside and I will get back to it after doing full justice by reading “Hack the Planet” as I am convinced that some form of geoengineering will eventually become part of humanity’s effort to put a lid – cap in BP’s language – in order to control the runaway increase of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Yuriy Izrael was talking of placing sulfur compounds in the upper atmosphere – others may have various sun deflectors in mind,
I for one may think that the Peter Glazer idea of concentrating sun light in outer space and beaming it back to earth might be a way to provide clean solar energy for our needs. I have no trust in the Carbon Capture and Sequestration concept – this because I do not think that we know how to do it and I mistrust those that promote the idea as it feels rather like an attempt to keep us away from research in positive directions that can wean us from our dependence on oil and coal. Further, it is clear that just companies like Haliburton and large oil companies will be the only ones to be able to implement these programs if there is ever some success with these ideas. This is also a geoengineering concept. Changing fish population in a pond is a case of forced change of nature and we have many examples that led to negative results because of unintended consequences.
Anyway – this is a large topic that serves our attention, so after talking to the great family of presenter Eli Kintisch – he was there with both his parents and kid brother – all knowledgeable in the subject – and to one of the people that asked questions, I continued to Piermont.
There it was all fun, but my connection to the book presentation is clear to me. It will eventually take a revolution to break down the Bastille walls of the anti-progress interests when dealing with climate change.
I saw in Piermont a friend from the UN, bought two interesting T-shirts and went home.
I still visited a great cooperative gallery – The Piermont Flywheel Gallery – that was about half works of Howard Berelson – a colorist with many scenes from East Africa.
He has a great painting from the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania – “Death in the Garden of Eden.” Was that bull failed also because of the high heat? Are the colors of the Hudson River Odyssey – another painting – so that we are reminded of the turning of our area into another hot Africa?
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and if someone is interested in contacting Academician Izrael:
Yuri IZRAEL
Institute of Global Climate and Ecology
Glebovskaya str., 20B
107258 Moscow
RUSSIA
Tel: +(7 095) 1692430
Fax: +(7 095) 1600831
E-mail: Yu.Izrael at g23.relcom.ru
Izrael and his team of scientists mounted aerosol generators on a helicopter and a car chassis, and proceeded to blast out particles at ground level and at heights of up to 200 meters. Then they attempted to measure just how much sunlight reaching Earth was reduced due to the aerosol plume.
This small-scale intervention was effective, the Russian scientists say. And in an accompanying article on geoengineering alternatives, Izrael and colleagues note that “Already in the near future, the technological possibilities of a full scale use of [aerosol-based geoengineering] will be studied.”
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Above leads to brain storming:
Billionaire airline tycoon Richard Branson baldly told the press last year, ‘If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necesary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.’
And what do you know – there is already a clear reaction to the geoengineering ideas:
But on the eve of this year’s UN-designated International Mother Earth Day, over 60 national and international organizations launched Hands Off Mother Earth (H.O.M.E.). The global campaign, now supported by the Ecologist, includes a website handsoffmotherearth.org) where signatories upload photos of themselves with their hands up in a ‘stop’ gesture.
The campaign insists that a halt be placed on geoengineering experiments and that the ‘rights’ of Planet Earth be respected. ‘Not just human beings have rights, but the planet has rights,’ asserts Evo Morales, Bolivian president and host of the recently concluded Cochabamba Climate Change Conference in Bolivia. The first right, he says, is ‘the right for no ecosystem to be eliminated’. The second, ‘for Mother Earth to live without contamination’. The final statement by the 35,000 people attending Cochabamba called out geoengineering as a false solution to the climate problem.
I think we should stop calling it a spill. A spill is something that you can pick up with a mop and paper towels. Calling this catastrophe in the Gulf a “spill” is like calling the Holocaust a paper cut. ??It is a blowout. An oil volcano. Oil Ecocide. Or maybe your readers can come up with a more apt phrase. We need to stop minimizing the description with the word “spill”; it is so much more than that. Let’s give it a real apt name!
Tigerlily
What say you, dear readers? Does the term “spill” downplay what’s happening in the Gulf right now?Photo courtesy Caro Wallis via FlickrA.
Dearest Tigerlily,
The situation in the Gulf has certainly generated a lot of lame naming. Remember Junk Shot and Top Kill, BP’s early attempts at plugging the leak? Even BP itself, now officially Beyond Petroleum, has been re-monikered — Beyond Politics, Black Paste, and Better Prosecute, among others.
Thankfully, for now, after nearly 90 days, the “spill” seems to not be “spilling”. Well, at least not as much as it has been.
But to your question, Tigerlily. You’re right. I’m no etymologist, but using a gentle term like “spill” to describe the ongoing gushing of oil and subsequent long term damage to habitat, wildlife, humans and economies seems wildly inaccurate.
But let’s consult the dictionary: According to Webster’s, the noun spill means “to cause or allow, esp. accidentally or unintentionally to fall, flow, or run out so as to be lost or wasted.” As a verb, to spill is “to flow, run, or fall out, over, or off and become wasted, scattered or spread profusely or beyond bounds.” And apparently it’s archaic usage was to KILL or DESTROY.
Dictionary.com adds a cause to its definition of spill, the verb: “to run or escape from a container, esp. by accident or in careless handling.”
Hmmm. Careless handling, killing, destroying, wasting beyond bounds. Maybe spill is more apt than we thought, Tigerlily. The dictionary definitions do conjure a darker meaning than the commonly used — and more benign — “spilled milk” cliche. But no matter what the dictionary says, how we use language is what matters. So how should we describe this large and disastrous event?
What about spew? Or eruption? A volcano doesn’t spill, it erupts. Then again, Gulf oil eruption sounds a tad awkward, don’t you think?
I’ve noticed several new portmanteaus in the wake of the Gulf disaster — oilpocalypse, oilmageddon, the oil-ocaust, oiltastrophe. But portmanteaus, two distinct words and their meanings blended together, are often meant to be funny, even a bit silly. Just look at “spork.” The portmanteau approach seems too trivial for this Gulf oil “spill.” And given that the leaky pipe has been stoppered, at least for the time being, what will we call the spill’s aftermath?
We could turn to W.S. Merwin, our newly appointed Poet Laureate, for the right words.
Or we could ask you, dear readers. How does “spill” sit with you? Are there other words that better express the gravity of the situation? Please help Tigerlily and me fashion a better handle for this 2010 Gulf oil disaster. (Now that has a ring to it … )
Semantically,
Umbra
P.S. Here’s “In Time” by W.S. Merwin for inspiration:
The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
and the loudspeakers telling us
about the vast fires on the backwater
consuming undisclosed remnants
and warning us over and over
to stay indoors and make no signals
you stood at the open window
the light of one candle back in the room
we put on high boots to be ready
for wherever we might have to go
and we got out the oysters and sat
at the small table feeding them
to each other first with the fork
then from our mouths to each other
until there were none and we stood up
and started to dance without music
slowly we danced around and around
in circles and after a while we hummed
when the world was about to end
all those years all those nights ago.
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